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Geoff Ibbett is an independent consultant with tremendous experience in the field of revenue assurance. Over the years he has held a string of senior roles at businesses like Subex, Azure, Connexn and Telecomms Consultancy & Solutions. I asked Geoff to join me for podcast 7, and we talked about the new revenue assurance training and accreditation program Geoff has developed for the TM Forum. We also talked about his work on the TMF’s new leakage framework, as well as his views on trends in the RA software market and about the professionalization of RA. You can listen to this informative interview by playing or downloading the podcast from talkRA. Better still, subscribe to the podcast via iTunes, and you will never miss a future episode.

The first of the TMF’s RA training and accreditation courses will be held in London, England and runs from September 14th to September 16th. Geoff told me there are still some spaces left, so if you are interested in booking a spot, you can find out more by visiting the TMF’s website.

Sorry to everybody who uses Morisso Taieb’s wonderful LinkedIn group for people working in revenue assurance, but they will not be syndicating talkRA articles any more. It has nothing to do with Morisso, who is doing a great job and who immediately responded when I asked him to stop the republication of the talkRA RSS feed. Why did I ask Morisso to stop it? I have written previously how LinkedIn is a semi-closed environment; it takes content in from other sources, but gives none out. When LinkedIn first allowed their groups to syndicate RSS, it was done by publishing an excerpt and including a link to the full page. That was fine by me, as I noted at the time, even though the flow would never go the other way. However, LinkedIn did not stop there. They then changed the outbound links to show a special “LinkedIn” frame above the pages of other websites, encouraging users to discuss about the pages on LinkedIn. Hmmm… like websites devoted to discussion want all the comments about their content to end up on LinkedIn’s (closed) site instead of their own (open) pages. It is a cheek, and a kind of unwelcome advertising that LinkedIn is placing over the top of content that LinkedIn exploits for free. Their frame says the page below is “provided by LinkedIn”. Untrue. They had nothing to do with providing the content. They did not write the content. The content is provided using a web server that they did not pay for, and do not control. The same content is available to anybody in the world who goes to the right URL. So what is provided by LinkedIn? A link that points to it. And the person who types in the URL will be somebody like Morisso who added the one for talkRA to his group. What chutzpah for LinkedIn to claim they provided anything, other than providing themselves with a greedy way to profit from other people’s material.

The unwelcome advert - an ‘ActionBar’ in LinkedIn’s strange terminology - was plugged on LinkedIn’s own blog. After congratulating themselves, they added the following words:

As always – we look forward to and appreciate your feedback. Feel free to leave a comment on this blog…

So I did comment. My comment did not get published. It seems LinkedIn love to facilitate conversations on their site, unless they happen to be critical of LinkedIn’s business ethics. For those of you interested in the content that LinkedIn are not so keen to republish, here is my comment about the LinkedIn ‘ActionBar’:

Nice idea – if you run a greedy business that wants to steal content, traffic and life from other websites.

There must be thousands of websites, like mine, that offer the ability to discuss and comment on specific topics without adverts. They are not run for profit, and they do not look like the “news” examples you selectively show in your screenshots, but their RSS feeds on posts and comments can be syndicated by LinkedIn groups in just the same way. By syndicating the RSS feed into LinkedIn’s closed loop, you have a simple, crude but effective attempt to hijack the content of those sites. Adding a frame is just the next step in trying to keep LinkedIn users on LinkedIn – whilst greedily taking content from outside.

The content of the RSS feed and the content of my website is copyright. I never gave permission for it to be syndicated on LinkedIn, and I do not want it to be syndicated on LinkedIn. Taking a short excerpt and a pointer back to the source is reasonable, but then adding an ugly frame to advertise LinkedIn is going too far. Worse still, as others have noticed, the frame often seems to be screwed up. Nine out of ten viewers will assume the problem is with the original site, and not with LinkedIn’s clumsy attempts to grow its revenue streams.

If LinkedIn was an ethical business, we would see copyright holders having the facility to object to this kind of abuse, in the same way that intellectual property is protected on websites that allow people to post videos and music. Problem is, those protections are given to help big business stop abuse by little guys. This new issue with LinkedIn syndication is about protecting the rights of ordinary guys who are abused by a big business. Shame on LinkedIn.

Remember, this content is brought to you on a site that requires no registration and prints every point of view, without censorship. The authors on LinkedIn share their material, but they are not giving it away, and they retain copyright. The internet is here so we can share. People who take, but do not give back, are the enemies of a healthy, vibrant and free internet. Help us to keep the internet open, and not just open for business.

Anyone who has been reading my blogs long enough will know I occasionally dig up and share examples of how the phrase “revenue assurance”, and its concepts, are applied to quite different businesses. In the past I found relevant examples relating to airlines, the oil industry, software, and even government taxation. It has been hard to find good new examples worth sharing recently, not least because the phrase revenue assurance is increasingly used in North America as a cover-all term for any activity that might involve making more money. However, look here for a press release about a type of revenue assurance I have not seen before: preventing “piracy” in the supply of financial information services through activities like the sharing of accounts. The article also describes the loss as a “leakage”. The principle applies well. If two people use the account for the same information resource, the supplier makes half the revenue then if he sold two separate subscriptions, so it should implement checks to stop account sharing.

Though the idea is right, taking revenue assurance to its logical limit may ultimately have a downside. I guess it is only a matter of time before we start talking about “revenue assurance” to stop people sharing their newspapers…

In a perfect world, everybody would get one-to-one tuition that was tailored for their every need, whenever they received any kind of education. In this imperfect world, our kids go to classes where one teacher takes a lesson for many children, students may fill large halls to listen to the same lecturer, and lots of different people will read the same book to get the knowledge they need. In this imperfect world, what is common to good RA training, and what should every RA practitioner learn?

I started out writing this post as a response to Gadi Solotorevsky’s comment on Mike Willet’s excellent post about training. It grew and grew, so I decided it would be best to just include this as a new post! In short, Gadi wrote that good training is not ‘one size fits all’. I want to rebut that assertion, partly because I do not think that is what Mike was suggesting, but mostly because it fails to address a much more serious issue in RA training. The more serious problem with most RA training is not that it fails to be specific. RA training is often very specific, sometimes to the point of not being relevant to the student. The more serious problem with most RA training is that it is overly specific. By being over specific, and lacking any common and universal principles, it does not train practitioners to be versatile and to cope with the unfamiliar. Because revenue assurance is about dealing with problems that people did not even realize were there to begin with, we cannot train people to be good practitioners by only giving them skills relevant to a few problems we now know to anticipate. The good RA practitioner must be able to adapt their skills to the unanticipated too, and must learn how to find issues even when nobody else has anticipated they can occur.

If revenue assurance is anything, then the specific instances of revenue assurance must have something in common. Shakespeare makes a similar point about dogs, because dogs can be very different but still have something in common:

“… hounds and greyhounds, mongrels, spaniels, curs,
Shoughs, water-rugs, and demi-wolves are clept
All by the name of dogs.”

Good training will be based on what is common to every situation. This includes the situations that the student is not familiar with, and even includes the situations that nobody has experienced yet because they have not happened yet. Tailoring a course for your organization sounds efficient, but how useful is the course if your organization is changing? How long will its value persist? Even if tailored, the course must be based on principles that can be applied outside of the specific examples that are covered.

Universal principles, once understood, are more valuable to the student than lots of specific packets of unconnected knowledge. However, the clearest failing in the revenue assurance world is that lots of people know lots of things about lots of particular detail, but struggle with what is RA in general. Take them from their comfort zone, and they fail. Present them with a new problem, that requires skills they lack, and they run from it and search for an old problem they have solved many times before. This observation was one of the driving motivations for setting up talkRA - to force people out of their narrow silos, get them talking to each other, and make them realize that RA is bigger than the skillset and experiences of any individual person.

At core, any training should be based on universals. Practitioners have more valuable skills is they learn methods and techniques that can be applied to any situation, instead of learning how to do just one task. It is the same as the differences in how we might teach history. I can teach somebody history by making them memorize a list of dates and events. I can teach them a lot more history without mentioning a single date or event, if I teach them how to do their own research. If the student can do his own research, he can then find out the detail that he needs, when he needs it. The most valuable kind of training ensures universal principles are explained, and then made specific and relevant to the audience, depending on what kind of audience is receiving the training.

Unless specific training is consistent with universal principles, then two specific training courses simply do not teach the same thing. If you wrote an RA training course for one telco based on one set of principles, and wrote a second RA training course for another telco based on another set of principles, then you have no consistency in what you are saying RA is. They may both be good courses, but they cannot both be good revenue assurance courses. The better the underlying the principles used to create a course, the more universal the principles those are, the better the training is for the recipient. Why? Because the student will be able to reapply those principles to new situations, if their business changes or if they move to do the same job in another business. Otherwise, they will just need to be completely retaught every time the situation changes.

As per one of Mike’s examples, you can teach people to do a job a certain way, by training them which buttons to push and how to use some software. They can do that job perfectly well if they keep pushing the same buttons, even if they have no idea why they are doing it. Then swap them over to new software, a new company, or a new product to be assured. You have to train them to push new buttons, and the training begins right back as if they learned nothing before! Better that they understand what is common between the two scenarios. It is not just about being efficient with training, it is about developing people as people - encouraging them to think and be adaptable, teaching them principles they can observe and reapply, and not just to be mindless drones who need to be reprogrammed for every new task they are set. Of course, you can make more money by exploiting mindless drones: they will be made to pay over and over again for more and more training…

There is lots of bad training in RA, and we need to identify why. There are lots of people, with very limited experience, offering to teach people who work in situations that are very different from any they understand. There are also lots of people happy to be trained in a kind of RA where they just want to be told how to push the buttons, and not to think for themselves. Those people might do okay in their job, but they do not understand RA and will be little better than a complete novice when they change job. Worst of all, this sector is full of people who know how to do one thing, and then pretend that one thing is the same as RA, and is equally powerful and relevant to every business and every situation. They train other people to do that one thing, fooling them into thinking they now understand RA as well. As Abraham Maslow said:

If you only have a hammer, you tend to see every problem as a nail.

The good RA practitioner has many tools in the toolbox, knows how to use them, knows how to adapt them to be used in new and unfamiliar situations, and even knows how to make and adapt his own tools to fit the task. You cannot teach that by telling people how to bang the same nails over and over. You teach it from first principles. First, people need to understand why they are doing what they are doing. Then they need to understand the choices they have about how they do it, so they can pick the best tool for the job. That is what good RA training has in common.

Subash Menon, boss and founder of Subex, tried to make the best of the release of Subex’s year end results. There were many positives. The business failed to achieve its profits guidance for a second year in a row, but the underlying FY09 results were significantly better than they were in FY08. Costs have been brought under control by relocating more work to India. Revenues were up by 15% compared to the year before, at nearly US$121m. The business has recovered to a level which looks like it can sustainably deliver positive operating cashflows and profits. Although this level of profitability is far more modest than the expectations management set during Subex’s golden years, at least it shows that Subex’s core business strategy is viable. Over the year, increased sales in EMEA compensated for a fall in sales in APAC. Cash collection was very good, and the business had a strong fourth quarter.

Unfortunately for Subash Menon, there also seemed to be a dark cloud for every bright spot in the company’s performance. To begin with, Subex’s order book is significantly thinner than it was at the previous year end. Whilst orders for its revenue management products were roughly equal to the previous year, orders for its fulfillment systems were well down. Over the year, new fulfillment orders were down 38% compared to FY08, and in the final quarter they nearly flatlined, with just US$0.7m of FAS orders in Q409 compared to US$7m in Q408. Secondly, though not discussed during the investor’s call, Subex’s largest source of revenues is still the Global Services division of BT. Although there is no reason to believe BT will not honour its contract with Subex, it cannot be good for Subex to be earning a large proportion of its income from a business that is in crisis. BT Global is in deep trouble and needs radical surgery if it is to be saved. Given the uncertainties about BT Global, Subex needs to diversify its customer base and become less reliant on its biggest customer.

One disappointment that had to be discussed during the results call was the whopping US$40m write-down of exchange losses on Subex’s Foreign Currency Convertible Bonds (FCCBs). This exceptional item drowned the slim operating profit of US$6m. That said, Subex is not in the Forex business, and this loss is not a significant reflection on the health of its business. Taking a big hit this year may be a smart move, if it helps backers to stay focused on improvements in Subex’s fundamentals. By far the darkest cloud for Subex is the one hanging over its future, with the US$180m of FCCBs due for redemption in 2012. Even the most wildly optimistic predictions for Subex still lead to a black hole of uncertainty as to what will happen to the company as the FCCB due date nears. The slide in Subex’s share price means the FCCBs will not be converted into equity. Subex does not generate enough cash to be able to redeem the FCCBs. That is obvious, and Subash Menon did not attempt to hide the facts during the investor’s call:

if one were to look at cash flows for the next three years which is when the debt would be…the FCCBs would be due, we certainly would not have cash flows anywhere near what is required for [redeeming the] FCCBs, certainly not, we will be way behind…

That means Subex will have to make an alternative arrangement to cover the cash outflow when it becomes due. Unless Subex can find a buyer with big pockets, Subex will need to arrange new debt to replace the FCCBs. Even if Subex can borrow the amount needed, the outcome will almost certainly mean servicing higher interest payments. This in turn will leave much less free cash to reinvest in the business or to return to shareholders. This is a very serious problem and it is not going to go away. However, Subash Menon currently has no advice to give. During the results call, he repeated the same basic message, which was:

FCCB is still an open issue, I don’t have anything to share on that front. I do understand that that is a major concern from everybody…

The FCCBs hang over Subex’s future. As we get closer to 2012, more and more people will be asking about Subex’s plan to deal with them. Subash Menon has enjoyed many sunny days whilst he built his world-beating business. Now a monsoon is inching towards him. He needs to find a solution to divert it or to deal with it. Whatever answer he comes up with will determine Subex’s long-term future, or even whether it has one.

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Lee Scargall, fellow talkRA author and Director of Enterprise Risk Management at Qtel International, joined me for podcast 6. We talked about a topic of increasing importance: how to deliver revenue assurance across international groups. Fewer and fewer telcos are run as stand-alone entities. Economies of scale has made it harder and harder for small national telcos to match the profits of large international groups. Cost reductions and efficiency savings increasingly drive groups to build scale by expanding overseas. At the same time, group-level executives see revenue assurance as vital to ensuring shareholder value is maximized in each national operation. I cannot think of anyone better placed to give advice on revenue assurance in groups. Lee was recruited to Qtel, the Qatari operator with ambitious plans for growth and international expansion, and tasked to implement their group function for risk management, revenue assurance and fraud management. He joined them after performing a similar role across the disparate overseas subsidiaries of Cable & Wireless. You can hear Lee’s frank advice about how to manage group revenue assurance by listening or downloading the podcast from talkRA. You can also hear and subscribe to the podcast using iTunes, meaning all future episodes will be downloaded as soon as they are available.

Walk around Britain today, and you sometimes see old houses with recesses in the walls. They look like they should have windows in them, except there is no window. The space is the right size, and in the right place for a window, but they are bricked up. They are reminders of a time when Britain had a ‘window tax’, a tax where the wealth of a man was measured by the number of windows in his house. You can imagine the kind of reaction that provoked, with two small windows costing double one big window. Governments are always looking for different ways to tax the people. At one time, the Russian state generated 40% of its revenues from a tax on vodka. Public toilets in France, Italy and Romania are still named after Roman Emperor Vespasian, who taxed the collection of urine. There are still many stupid taxes today. Almost half of the states in the US have laws to make people pay tax on illegal drugs. Not surprisingly, most illegal drug users also dodge the drug taxes too. A few weeks ago, talkRA colleague Lee Scargall reported on a crazy suggestion to introduce a tax on SMS messages in the UK. I laughed it off, but I laughed too soon. Although there is no signs that such a bonkers tax will be levied in the UK, there is a serious proposal to introduce just such a tax in the Philippines.

Of course, the Philippine authorities are trying not to call it a tax. It will be a ‘fee’ of perhaps 5 centavos (about 1 US cent) per text. The fee will be used to pay US$30 million for metering devices, to check that the Philippines government is getting all their money. You can read about the story here, here, here and here.

The Philippines are the highest per capita users of SMS in the world, so a penny a text must seem like a great way to raise cash for the government. With US$30m at stake, there must be some vendors out there willing to tell the Philippine authorities what a good idea the scheme is, and how they are right not to trust the telcos. US$30m does not sound like the kind of number picked at random either, so somebody must have had a few sly conversations with possible suppliers. Money talks, but whoever is whispering sweet nothings about extra money from telcos, the Philippine government should turn a deaf ear.

The window tax was a bad tax, even though it was simple. That is why we no longer have it. It tried to make money from the richest, but counting windows is a poor way to work out who is richest. The same criticism applies to this text tax. If the Philippine government wants to tax telcos more, then they can just pass a law and take more of their profits. Taking money direct from revenues just ducks the question of how those revenues should be spent. The Philippines benefits more in the long-run if the telcos invested in infrastructure and services. The employees of telcos benefit if they are paid well and have job security. Profits come after costs like investments and the pay received by staff. Taxing profits does not punish businesses that invest or reward their staff well. Taxing revenues does. Taxing revenues is short-sighted, and discourages expenditure on infrastructure and on employees. One way or another, telcos who carry an extra tax burden will either charge the consumer more to compensate, or they will spend less on providing current and future services, or they will generate smaller profits. If customers end up paying more, then the text fee will be an extra stealth tax on them. If investment or pay falls, that hurts customers and the economy too. And if profits fall, then you end up in exactly the position you would have been in if you had just put a bigger tax on profits to begin with, except you wasted US$30m on a lot of extra technology to do it.

In the end, the only sure-fire winners in the Philippine scheme would be overseas. An overseas business will get the contract, because the technology will need to be imported. Whichever supplier wins the deal, the taxman in their country will be taking his slice. But back in the Philippines, somebody is paying for a lot of unnecessary equipment.

Despite the recent crisis, there is only one sensible place for governments to be looking for money, and that is in banks. Whether a telco makes money from SMS messages, voice or from the food sold in the staff canteen, that money ends up somewhere. Audit the company’s numbers, trace the money, take what is owed - that is how a tax system should work. Money comes out of the telco customer’s pocket and ends up in a bank somewhere. It does not just disappear. Looking for that money by poking around a telecoms network or interrogating a database would mean asking the taxman to run the telecoms business, instead of just taxing it. A good telco will turn all its network usage into money, and the taxman will take his share of the money. A bad telco will fail to turn all its network usage into money, meaning there is less money for the taxman too. But the taxman is not going to help himself by trying to interfere in a failing business. Even a greedy taxman is never going to be better at running a business than a greedy businessman. And even if the taxman did help the telco to make more money, it would be because customers were previously underbilled, or because the telco was engaged in fraud. If customers were underbilled, then the result is that customers will pay more, which is exactly what the politicians are promising will not happen. On the other hand, if the problem is internal fraud within, or by, the telco, then network data will not help. Any good RA practitioner should know you do not find hidden cash by trying to do a usage reconciliation - you do it by tracing cashflows. Trying to reconcile cash to usage would be a massive (and probably inconclusive) distraction from the real goal. Usage reconciliations are good for finding leakages nobody knows about, not for finding cases where real money is being hidden. A good auditor does not need to know about a customer’s usage just to tell if the money the customer spent has gone missing within the business being audited.

The text tax is a sneak attack - a confused and confusing attempt to raise taxes whilst pretending that nobody has to pay for them. Either it steals from customers whilst hiding behind the telco, or it involves governments invading telcos and telling them how to run their businesses. Neither is a credible or sensible way to increase public funds. It is a bad idea all round, and is seemingly inspired by a lot of confusion between the principles of auditing cashflow (something the taxman has a reasonable right to ask questions about) and auditing business performance (definitely not the job of the taxman in a free society).

Thankfully, it looks like the Philippine customers are less easily confused than the Philippine authorities. It is reported that consumer groups are angry at the proposal. Good for them. That stands as proof that you do not need to spend US$30m just to understand what is really going on…

Subtle title, huh? Sorry, I thought I might as well be direct about the revenue assurance industry’s leading scumbag, Rob Mattison. Yes, I know what some of you thinking: “leave it, Eric, everybody knows Mattison is a scumbag already”. Sad to say, that is not true. Not everybody knows he is a scumbag. If they knew, then nobody would waste their money on his sham qualification. My language is getting stronger because I am left dumbfounded by Mattison’s latest, brazen attempt at self-promotion. That Mattison constantly promotes himself, and that he has no sense of right or wrong is of no surprise to me. What amazes is that two years ago he was caught and stopped from doing the same thing - advertising himself on Wikipedia - yet he cannot resist trying again.

Two years ago, the Wikipedia page on revenue assurance had to be ripped down because of repeated spam from Papa Rob Mattison, owner, founder, self-appointed president and financial beneficiary of the Global Revenue Assurance Professionals Association (GRAPA), one of the publishing/consultancy/training businesses he runs with his family. At that time Papa Rob was promoting his then new international professional association. Little did he care that it is dishonest to call something international when it has no actual members. Little did he care that he was breaking the rules on Wikipedia. Little did he care that his justification for his behaviour - that he was President of a global society - has as little legitimacy as me appointing myself King of the World. But even I am amazed that he would stoop so low to wait a couple of years, and then try exactly the same trick again.

Wikipedia is a noble idea. Its mission is to give everybody in the world, no matter how poor, an encyclopedia. Whether you come from Harare, Harlem or Ho Chi Minh City, if you can get on the internet, you can get a good encyclopedia without spending thousands of dollars. At least, that is the idea. Let me say that again clearly: it is about helping the world’s poor to get access to encyclopedic reference material. It is not meant to be a free advertising site. Wikipedia has rules, and the rules are meant to discourage people from promoting their own business interests. People can break those rules, and many do. It is up to others to spot when the rules are broken and to undo the vandalism they do. So it is discouraging to see that, years after the revenue assurance page had to be torn down because of his spam, Mattison has nothing better to do than to recreate the revenue assurance page for the sole purpose of advertising his business interests.

Let us be clear about what Rob Mattison has done. Two years ago, he repeatedly broke the Wikipedia rules despite many warnings, and as a result the whole revenue assurance page had to be deleted. Now, desperate to promote himself on one of the top 10 websites in the world, he is doing it again. This is no innocent mistake, made without knowledge of Wikipedia’s rules. He knows what the rules are, and he deliberately abuses them in the hope that nobody who knows better will notice what he has done and identify which rules he has broken. He is hoping that, two years later, everybody forgot what he did and nobody will see that he is at it again. What a man to be giving lectures and handing out certificates that proclaim ‘ethics’ and ‘integrity’. He is a cheat, he got caught cheating, and now he is cheating again. Worst of all he cheats a charity (unlike Mattison’s bogus business, Wikipedia depends on genuine charitable contributions) which tries to help the world’s poor. He perverts the Wikipedia mission to spread knowledge by turning into an advert for his sham qualifications. Nobody who aspires to be a professional should have anything to do with Mattison the Maggot.

How do I know Rob Mattison created the new Wikipedia page? Well, it is not hard to tell. There are plenty of clues, such as that the person who created the new revenue assurance page has never bothered to write or edit any other Wikipedia page before. The page itself contains all those tell-tale signs that Mattison-knows-all, such as being a cut and paste from his book and containing helpful links to his business sites (none of which is allowed per Wikipedia’s rules). But if that does not convince you, let me point out that the user who created the revenue assurance page lives in Illinois, the same place as Mattison and all his businesses live, but otherwise not known for its thriving RA industry. Coincidence? I doubt it. How do I know the person lives in Illinois? The same user created both the revenue assurance page and the new ‘Global Revenue Assurance Professionals Association’ page (a page we can all agree has no place in an encyclopedia). That same person made a series of edits in the space of a few minutes. For some reason, they logged out half way through their edits. If you are not logged in to Wikipedia, then your IP address is shown instead - 75.57.114.203 in this case. That is an IP address for Illinois. Creating pages to promote yourself, creating links to your own websites, hiding behind an assumed identity to pretend no rules are broken - all against the rules, all petty, all the kind of thing you expect from a maggot, not a man.

I hold my hands up in despair. When things like this happen it makes me feel sick to the pit of my stomach. Despite (or perhaps because of) all the easy talk about ‘professionalism’ and ‘integrity’, this kind of behaviour makes me feel ashamed to work in revenue assurance. Perhaps I am unrealistic in my expectations. Perhaps revenue assurance is nothing but an exercise in how to make a quick buck. If so, there is no need to waste your money on a professional qualification, this scam will be dead long before you will see a return on your investment. If you think revenue assurance is a pathetic excuse to make yourself a few more dollars by talking a lot of nonsense, then I recommend you join GRAPA. Ask yourself, if revenue assurance is such a good way to save telcos billions, and he knows so much about how to do it, then why does Mattison work so hard to make money by selling training to other people? Why does Mattison not just make his money by doing revenue assurance? Because he sells the same things as those people who sell books that promise to make you rich - he sells empty promises and he is the only person who will get rich from them. If his training is good, and so popular and so well recognized all over the planet, then why does he resort to spamming Wikipedia as a way to promote it? Because GRAPA is failing and he is desperate and he will rape a charitable site intended to help the world’s poor if that helps him to make more money. If you promise to say how great he is, he will gladly give you a phoney title to put on your CV. He has handed out a hundred GRAPA titles already, but if you confront his former executive committee members, they sheepishly admit they did nothing to earn those titles - other than to allow their names to be used to endorse GRAPA. Do not be fooled. The people who own and run GRAPA are the family Mattison, with Papa Rob at the head. Nobody else gets a say in how it is run, and nobody else ever will.

Like Wikipedia adverts, empty titles cost nothing. You, on the other hand, will be wasting your money if you buy a certificate from Mattison. Saying that, you will get exactly what you deserve: a worthless piece of paper. Tell people you got it, and it will be even worse. You might as well write on your CV that you are a sucker. You might as well tell the world that you are not fit to do a job that may involve asking tough questions and not accepting the first, easiest answer you get in response. Be warned. Real RA professionals can tell the difference between real qualifications and joke qualifications, and are unlikely to offer work to those people who cannot.

On the other hand, if you think revenue assurance might actually become a profession one day, then do something about it. Take responsibility into your own hands, like a real professional would. Monitor Wikipedia and stop the name of revenue assurance being dragged through the gutter for the sake of endless advertising. Make sure that your colleagues know that you take a moral stand against this blatant abuse of a charitable organization and you have no respect for the people responsible. Better still, write something on Wikipedia about revenue assurance that follows the Wikipedia rules - but only if you can. That means write something that is independently referenced and of genuine academic calibre. That is not the same as something which is a promo for your business or a statement of your personal opinion, with no justification other than you think you are right. In other words, spend an hour doing what our talkRA colleague Güera Romo does every day. Güera is doing real academic study about revenue assurance. Her work is subject to proper academic review by real academics, not the tacit endorsement of a dozen people who will agree to anything if it might help them make more money. Güera is taking the long hard road to increasing the knowledge in the world, not the short cut to making a few bucks by cheating, exaggerating and lying. The job of an academic can be thankless, but it is that work, that dedication, that integrity which will eventually produce some material worthy of inclusion in an encyclopedia. If you care, I say back Güera and people like her, back the profession, back academic rigour and back integrity - and stand up against the spam and the get-rich-quick fools who would drag us all into the gutter.

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Update (18th May 2009):

Over the last few days, following a series of exchanges with those wonderful volunteers who administer Wikipedia, the Wikipedia page on revenue assurance was first deleted completely, then resurrected back to a two year old version that predates Mattison’s first attempts to spam it. To prevent ongoing spam, the page is locked to prevent edits from ordinary users. It is a shame that the RA community cannot be trusted to manage its own Wikipedia page, but perhaps this is a turning point. Under the watchful supervision of the volunteer administrators of Wikipedia, who are completely impartial and whose only interest is in getting an article fit for an encyclopedia, perhaps this is an opportunity to build some consensus amongst the RA community. Users cannot make changes, but they can propose changes to the Wikipedia page. Rather than expecting the volunteer admins at Wikipedia to decide which sounds good and which sounds bad, it would be really helpful if good RA people all got involved, and commented on which proposed changes should be accepted. If you have not looked before, take a look at the page and get involved in the discussion, whilst always remembering the goal is consensus and to show how everything can be supported with a reliable reference. The Mattison spam attack might prove to be a blessing in disguise, if this proves to be a turning point in forming a genuine consensus about the core fundamentals of revenue assurance.

Israeli revenue assurance vendor ECtel have announced their Q1 results today. They make fairly dismal reading. Despite previous optimism that 2009 would be good for revenue assurance, ECtel reported revenues of just US$3.4m, compared to US$6.5m in the same quarter of 2008 and US$4.8m in the last quarter. ECtel’s statement is upbeat about orders and highlights their improved gross margins compared to the previous quarter, but they would doubtless prefer to report a lot more of the same kind of lower-margin sales they made in 2008. Costs have been cut, but this has only helped to keep operating losses to a relatively constant rate. ECtel’s performance might look a lot healthier if the US dollar strengthened further, because its income is weighted to the dollar relative to its cost base. Even so, the challenge will be to turn the current order backlog into cash and get closer to the promised break-even later this year.

In Portugal, there was quite a different story following the announcement of the Q1 figures from Sonaecom, parent group to revenue assurance vendors WeDo. Buried in the numbers were the statements that WeDo enjoyed 5.7% sales growth compared to last year, and that WeDo’s revenues account for about 67% of the service revenues of the Sonaecom SSI division. That equates to WeDo sales of €10.4m in Q1, and a rise of €0.5m compared to the same period in 2008. Two highlights were the expansion into other sectors as well as telecommunications, and that 58% of sales were from overseas. However, with the very limited financial data available about WeDo, it would be just as easy to note that there is no way to tell how much of the growth in revenues came from sales made outside telecommunications, and how reliable these revenues will be in future. WeDo also compares negatively to its competitors when it comes to true international diversification, with over 40% of revenues still being earned from its domestic market.

Every man and his dog seems to offer revenue assurance of one type or another. They may have a bit of a software that fell off the back of Microsoft’s lorry. They may know how to do a ‘join’ statement in SQL. They may follow a systematic process, which is helpfully outlined a colourful booklet they wrote using PowerPoint. The very worst have briefly stood in the car park of a telco whilst waiting to meet someone for lunch, which we all know is more than enough practical experience to do revenue assurance and save millions, and possibly even MILLIONS, for their prospective customers. It should not be a surprise that Nortel offer revenue assurance either. In a world where bankers just pretend to invest your money whilst perpetrating giant frauds, I suppose it makes business sense for Nortel to make money from checking if their customers have installed their equipment properly. What baffles me is why it would make business sense for anyone else to pay Nortel for knowledge Nortel should have told them already.

Have you ever asked Nortel for engineering information so you can do revenue assurance? I do not mean asking some dumbo “so tell me, what is this revenue assurance thing?” question. I mean asking for useful information, that would enable you to determine if there was any revenue loss because the switch was incorrectly configured. I mean, asking Nortel because your business has already spent millions on Nortel’s equipment, and maybe they should show the customer a little respect when asking an intelligent question about how the equipment works, even if you do work in Finance and do not have an engineering degree. I mean, asking for detailed information, very specific information, that only Nortel or somebody trained by Nortel could reasonably be expected to know. Have you? I have. It was painful. It was slow and painful. If given the choice between doing it again and punching myself in the face until I knocked myself unconscious, my response would be to slip a gumshield into my mouth and ask for help with taping up my fists.

I cannot blame Nortel’s people for not wanting to deal with revenue assurance people, especially after the sale has been made. They must feel their job is to deal with the network engineers in a telco. Nortel has long been a loss-making business and now it is a bankrupt business, so nobody in Nortel is going to get a promotion by spending a lot of time waffling with a customer unless it will result in an extra payday for Nortel. I appreciate that. Even so, reading through Nortel’s promotional literature for revenue assurance, I think they have a frightful cheek. Take a look at this excerpt:

Traditional Revenue Assurance solution offerings often identify issues through costly data analysis activities. They analyze and correlate warehouses of call record data from switches and SS7 networks to uncover discrepancies or expected volume thresholds not being reached. These approaches are very expensive and only identify symptoms of the actual problems. These solutions cannot pinpoint the exact root cause of the problems and cannot advise the service provider on how to fix the problems.

Nortel leverages the experience and expertise of its professionals, combined with proven toolsets, to quickly identify root cause configuration problems on the switch in a very cost-effective manner.

I completely agree with the first paragraph. A little bit of knowledge can often enable RA to solve problems far more quickly, and more cheaply, than they will by doing a lot of data crunching. What angers me is the second paragraph - implying you should pay Nortel extra for the kind of knowledge transfer that should come as standard when buying their kit. Why would you buy Nortel kit, and not expect Nortel to share the information needed so that the telco’s staff can configure it? If they have shared the knowledge, but the telco’s engineers do not put it into practice, then the problem is with priorities and the management of information in the telco. A problem like that cannot be solved by endlessly running back to Nortel for help - and paying them a premium when you do. Worst of all, if Nortel expects customers to pay additional fees to find out how to correctly configure their equipment, what hope is there that customers can just call Nortel and find out for free, simply because they are already a customer?

It is a slippery slope that starts with getting revenue assurance from an equipment manufacturer. All the equipment manufacturer can and should do is tell you how to properly use their equipment, and the obvious question is why you need to pay extra fees to make that happen. If Nortel did a lousy job of knowledge transfer, then the onus is on them to improve, without expecting to turn their failure into an opportunity to sell additional services. I know from personal experience that Nortel can do better when it comes to knowledge transfer. To be the fair, they do hand over the knowledge, but they do it in such a big lump it would take somebody with the genius of Leonardo da Vinci and the patience of Michelangelo to sort through it and identify what is most important to which aspect of the telco’s goals. Revenue generation is one of those goals. Nortel write big, thick, comprehensive manuals, but picking through them to determine which aspects of configuration could result in leakage is like looking for the proverbial needle in a haystack.

It does not get better when you try to interact with Nortel’s people. When you phone their experts, you should receive an expert answer, and not the mixture of bluff and codswallop that I sometimes got. I find it bemusing that Nortel want to offer audits to their customers. My audit of their customer service concluded you must be patient and persistent if you want to speak to somebody who can answer your questions based on knowledge, and not guesswork. In the meantime, your telco keeps losing money because of those leakages.

If the problem with knowledge transfer is not with Nortel, but with the telco’s own staff, then paying Nortel more money for more knowledge transfer makes no sense. The money will be wasted and in a short while you will need to be paying them to tell you the same things once again. Telcos need to take responsibility for managing complex information relating to complete, accurate and valid generation of revenue data. To do that, they may need to change who takes responsibility for what, change the way information is managed, and make sure that somebody close to the technology is responsible for those revenues. You can do that by making an engineer care about revenues, or you can do that by making an accountant care about engineering, but you cannot do that without finding the marriage between money and technology.

Whoever is at fault when equipment is incorrectly configured, the answer is not to buy revenue assurance from the manufacturer. All aspects of your network should work correctly, including the recording of information that will eventually be converted into cash. The real value of a piece of kit is not measured by how much it costs, but by the revenues it generates. Accurately recording those revenues is not an optional extra - it should come as standard.