The Newsweek of Aug 25, 2008 featured an article on the campus of the future. Michael Crow is approaching the running of the school like a CEO would run a business. What is striking from this article is the abolishment of traditional departments and combining these functions into what he calls “transdisciplinary” institutes. His objective is to get experts in different fields to work together to solve problems by thinking outside their disciplines.  For example, the new School of Sustainability features professors from 35 disciplines!

I recently had a discussion with a local university and a similar concept was discussed. While some universities still have very strict enrollment rules per department or course, these are normally more related to preventing an administration nightmare, than truly ensuring that the candidate has adequate foundation knowledge to progress in his/her new field of study.  There are ways to navigate through these lines of study which can take a student from one field of graduate study to another field for post-graduate study. Is this regarded then as interdisciplinary, multidisciplinary, crossdisciplinary or transdisciplinary?

• Interdisciplinary refers to professions where the traditional academic boundaries are crossed and its goal is to connect or integrate the knowledge from the different disciplines to establish knowledge in a new field of study such as in the case of geobiology. 
• Multidisciplinary refers to joining the knowledge from different disciplines without integration. The aim here is not to establish something new but to look at the same reality from different perspectives to explain the phenomena.
• Cross disciplinary discusses a subject in terms of another. It looks for metaphors or likeness to explain a concept or object in another language if you will, one that would be understood by someone trained in another field of study or discipline.
• Transdisciplinary uses the multidisciplinary approach with the difference of engaging these disciplines as stakeholders in solving a problem. It is not only viewing the reality from different perspectives to explain why the reality is such but is actually working together to overcome a problem without integrating the individual disciplines knowledge.

I looked through the comments posted to the question about the Fraudulent Engineer and would like to quickly summarize the knowledge, skills and abilities (KSA’s) I picked up there.

• “…requiring some serious levels of expertise and a fair amount of coding”
• “…extracting all switch inventory tables and applying a lot of switch architecture knowledge”
• “…DMS filter compensation”
• Knowledge to know that there are switch level settings to suppress the generation of XDR’s and that there are legitimate business reasons for suppressing them (not all suppressions are fraudulent, so which is fraud and which not?)
• Switch settings at different levels such as line level, global level and group level and which rules override which?
• An understanding of trunks and gateways
• The ability to extract data and make it available in a form to run queries. This implies knowledge of SQL, SAS, advance Excel, etc
• Interconnect knowledge
• Service profile knowledge. This covers the difference between profile components on the network elements vs the profile components on the billing system. These 2 worlds don’t always use the same naming conventions, so that mapping must be understood as well as the fact that billing specific profile components may not be on the network and vice versa
• Root cause analysis
• Deductive and inductive reasoning abilities

Considering that RA mostly reports into Finance and the typical job profile for the RA analyst asks for reconciliation and recovery of leakage (correct the under or overbilling by correcting the reference data and resubmit the event for processing or raising a journal to correct the financial impact), at which point do we teach these analysts of switch level settings and are there courses available, aimed at the average non-technical RA analyst that covers this knowledge?

I have to confess, I learnt from this question. I did not know that it was possible to use the network without leaving a trace in the form of a call record (partial, incomplete or not) that I was there using it. I knew it was possible to delete those records early in the process and not send them through to mediation.

This raises an interesting point for the composition of the RA team and implies that RA is a decentralized function within the organization which requires contribution and support from all departments to resolve a query such as this. It is unlikely that the RA department, reporting to the CFO would employ this range of technical and telco knowledge.

I would like to hear from operators following these discussions who have people with this knowledge employed in their immediate teams and what motivation was given to management to allow such technical skills to be employed in Finance.

While browsing the web in search of literature for a research study, I came across a job ad, which asked for “hardcore RA skills”. I was momentarily wondering if RA evolved into something akin to the pleasure industry! Another job ad asked for a CA qualification coupled with solid telecommunication network experience. The role responsibilities suggested that certain IT development skills would be an advantage. Now that is a mouthful for 1 person to contribute to a RA Management position.

My contribution to this group is in field of HR and OD practices applicable to sustainable RA.  We will be discussing ideal role profiles; knowledge, skills and abilities (KSA’s) required; recruitment practices and RA personnel performance management.

The objective is to debate a number of assumptions held which may or may not be valid. Please invite non-RA people to participate in these discussions as well. A review of general recruitment practices may highlight solutions to specific issues plaguing operators and RA consulting firms.