Regular readers of talkRA will know that I maintain an irregular series of posts about revenue assurance for businesses other than communications providers. That is because I find examples on an irregular basis. I find it useful to keep a ‘scrapbook’ of every example I find of RA in other sectors. Building up the scrapbooks helps to show how the ideas of revenue assurance, and also the phrase ‘revenue assurance’, can be adapted to serve other needs. So far, that irregular series has found some fascinating instances of revenue assurance outside of telecoms: oil production, airlines, government taxation, the hotel industry and many more. Another recurring but splintered theme in revenue assurance is what it will become next. Every so often, but with increasing regularity, I see whitepapers, interviews, press releases and other material where somebody or other is extending the idea of revenue assurance in a different direction. Who will guess right and both predict and shape the future of revenue assurance? Only time will tell. In the meantime, let me start collecting this new scrapbook of the alternative visions of where RA is going. To begin with, take a look at this paper from Victor Milligan of Martin Dawes Analytics. Without saying so explicitly, the paper suggests that ‘process analytics’ will be one direction for the future extension of revenue assurance. That might be a stretch of the imagination for some people in RA, but Victor’s arguments about the potential value of process analytics deserve some consideration.

When advising people on what I am looking for in revenue assurance, sometimes I find it easiest to use metaphors. The right metaphor has the advantage of conveying an involved idea very succinctly, though as with any abstraction, a poor choice can be misleading. One of my favourite metaphors is to the metaphor of health. We want our patient, the telco, to be healthy, and RA plays the role of a doctor. A poor doctor treats symptoms – waits for leaks to occur and then tries to recover them. A good doctor treats the disease itself – the root causes of leakage – so there are no illnesses, and no symptoms, any more.

This excellent article in Connected Planet Online really impressed me, because it talks about where revenue assurance should really be headed. It talks about transforming businesses so services are delivered right first time, pleasing customers, saving costs, and spelling an end to the culture which says leakage is inevitable. As I read it, I was trying to think of the right way to sum it up, but it is so well written that it is hard to convey its many-layered message any more succinctly or elegantly than the article already does, without losing some of its flavour. So let me just use a metaphor. If good revenue assurance is about making a business healthy, then the article says that you need revenue assurance right in the bones of the business, and should not treat it as a cosmetic that you apply to the skin. We need to get inside our telcos, changing it from the inside out. Only then will revenue assurance have delivered the optimal benefit to the business.

I must admit I have not spoken to people at Verizon Business or their software vendor, Something Digital, but I had to share this case study with you all. In short, it says Something Digital built a revenue assurance dashboard using Microsoft Silverlight as the front end, and Microsoft SharePoint as the back end. MS SharePoint as the back end to an RA system?!? If they had said SQL Server I would have understood. The question that comes to mind is: how does the SharePoint back end work? SharePoint is a platform for web collaboration and publishing – yet Something Digital says that users can drill down into the detail of where orders have not been processed, services are not billed, or billing is ‘improper’:

Essentially, we designed and built a user interface that would make it easy to highlight exactly where revenue was being lost throughout the organization, for both operations personnel and executives. Once an item was flagged, indicated by a red light, users could drill down to the raw data illustrating the problem.

According to Wikipedia, SharePoint can be used for:

developing web sites, portals, intranets, content management systems, search engines, wikis, blogs, and other tools for business intelligence.

Is this a surprising extension of the BI capabilities of SharePoint, used to serve the goals of RA? Or is there another back end behind the ‘back end’ of Sharepoint?

Portuguese RA vendor WeDo is reported to have a 25% share of the worldwide market for revenue assurance, making them market leaders. The claim was made by research business Stratecast, in their new Revenue Assurance and Cost Management Global CSP Sector Assessment. Stratecast calculated that the RA market was worth USD235 in 2009. You can read WeDo’s press release here and can obtain Stratecast’s report from here.

Susana Schwartz of Connected Planet speculates whether the reasons for WeDo’s success lie in the personalized customer service it gives, and in seeking to provide assurance over a much wider cross-section of business processes than their competitors. You can read her article here. As far as the business processes are concerned, Schwartz notes that:

WeDo works to align processes with that of the TM Forum’s larger business process framework, dubbed eTOM

Leverage of the TMF’s intellectual property makes sense. In other words, treat the eTOM as a checklist of business process and then build assurance of those processes around the checklist. Using the eTOM gives some solidity to the foundations of ‘business assurance’, the tagline that WeDo uses to explain how it pushes beyond the boundaries of revenue assurance.

The Stratecast report also says that the RA market is growing, and predicts a 22% CAGR. However, caution is needed; previous reports have also forecast rapid growth in the RA market. Had those projections been reliable, then the current market would be significantly bigger.

Güera’s recent post on undisciplined theory really resonated with me. I was especially drawn to her saying it was good thing “to think and feel ambivalence”.

These days, the ambivalence of revenue assurance tends to preoccupy me more than ever. Tensions have steadily mounted between different camps, each trying to exert a different influence over the direction taken by revenue assurance. Many decent practitioners have completely left the field, choosing to pursue better career options. Even more new people have come in, but they all still lack a sense of how to achieve sustained career progression. Some have bought in to a dumbed-down myth of professionalism. By doing so, they fail to appreciate that the easier it is to attain a level of distinction, the less valuable it is, and the harder it becomes to elevate yourself afterwards. With all that in mind, I believe this conflict within RA has vindicated the talkRA mission. When there is no one simple answer to a question, it is better that we hear all sides before coming to a conclusion.

In a recent interview, Avi Basu, CEO of Indian RA vendor Connectiva, revealed some of his thoughts on how revenue assurance and service assurance complement each other:

One of the major challenges operators face as they evolve their networks to support Internet, VoIP and multimedia services is their inability to trace transactions end-to-end across the networks.

Complete, real-time visibility of the transactional data is essential for effective network management as well as service and revenue assurance.

You can read the interview with Avi Basu here.

Linking service assurance and revenue assurance makes sense from a technical perspective. The idea that service assurance will converge with revenue assurance is not new; a number of commentators have pointed out the potential data and systems synergies over the years, though delivery has lagged the principle. The idea is also echoed in Subex’s mirroring of the Network Operations Centre with a Revenue Operations Centre. However, the trend towards real-time processing of transactions has enhanced the business case for dual-role monitoring of transaction data for both revenue assurance and service assurance. But we should not forget the obstacle to alignment created by organizational and cultural divisions. If revenue assurance monitoring is performed by the Finance function of a communications provider, this will create challenges for connecting it to a technology and operations-led function responsible for service assurance. That said, quality of service is a vital element in understanding what drives revenues and customer satisfaction, especially as we move to all-IP networks. For excellent service and maximized profits, communications providers will need to grow revenue and service assurance out of their distinct silos and see the relationship between them in terms of the whole of the customer’s experience.