It is with utter frustration that I write this blog tonight. I feel like saddling up my transformation horse and change the archaic processes of academic institutions. It is perhaps not their fault.

I am reading the same RA material over and over in different forms. Some industry magazines have articles which portrait a reality closer to our experience within RA.  However, very few make reference to where they got such insight. Is this the author’s experience, his opinion or somebody else’s opinion he happens to capture aptly in an article? It is rather frustrating when you read something and realize you have read this exact sentence before.

Now consider this for context first. I am using over 40 sources for 1 chapter of literature review. For the essence of RA, I am working through more than 40 sources, which range from a 2-page industry magazine article to a 705-page book on Revenue Management. Trying to remember the context of each of these sources so that it can be consulted again in subsequent sections is daunting on its own. Trying to figure out which source is more authentic than the next is quite difficult.

What is driving me to consume large quantities of Easter eggs at midnight? The fact that the real goodies do not appear in literature suitable for academic research.  The gap between the reality on the floor and half the “how to’s” does not allow me to portrait the vision of RA for the future. In a sense it is almost a case of “whoopee, somebody integrated 12 years of literature to serve as “RA over the last decade for Dummies” because it certainly does not provide much of a basis to build on other than confirming that we are all over the damn show. But then again, those of us interested enough in the discipline know that.

The upside is that there are more than 40 sources to use, even more still if I really wanted to incorporate them all but that would not add any value. It is just sad that good material is available in blogs and speaking to people too busy in the trench to bother with approaching an academic journal to publish such knowledge. That is tacit knowledge that you can never give justice to in a 2-page opinion-flavoured article.

Perhaps we should hunt down the review committees of academic journals in the ITC or Telco fields and offer them some of my Easter eggs in exchange for making the process easier to publish real stuff.

I have come across the use of the term forensic in GRAPA literature. I was unsure of its meaning and assumed it made reference to the analysis and resolution of fraudulent activity committed by either the subscriber or telco personnel. A cursory glance at the training material and the certification requirements also suggest a major focus on forensic skills. In course module RM100 for instance forensics appear to mean analysis (…students will learn the detailed steps in the process of Forensics, Controls Management, Corrections and Compliance).

In a recent post on Linked In http://www.linkedin.com/groupAnswers?viewQuestionAndAnswers=&gid=126200&discussionID=1505637&goback=%2Eanh_126200 the following reference to forensic was made: “skilled technologist who have detailed understanding of the systems and data architectures or are supported by people who have that knowledge and equally important people who understand the business process flows e2e. 

Once you truely understand the nature of the systems and data you have, you will be able to readily identify the types of RA activities that suit or are needed in your environment and will be able to target the toolsets which most closely align with your needs”.

According to the Cambridge English Dictionary the term forensic refers to “the study of physical information connected with crime” or it may also refer to the place where the evidence of the crime is sent for analysis. Wiki defines it as “the application of a broad spectrum of sciences to answer questions of interest to the legal system. This may be in relation to a crime or to a civil action. More generally forensics encompasses the accepted scholarly or scientific methodology and norms under which the facts regarding an event, or an artifact, or some other physical item (such as a corpse, or cadaver, for example) are to the broader notion of authentication whereby an interest outside of a legal form exists in determining whether an object is in fact what it purports to be, or is alleged as being”. Now one can argue here that 2 billion records processed by mediation and forwarded to rating “purports to be, or is alleged as being” 2 billion billable records since a mediation rule is implemented to filter out non-billable events and pass them directly to EDW for reporting purposes.

Gartner, in an article about setting up an RACC, compared the approach of some 8 vendor and consulting firms to implementing an RA project and setting up an RA Competency Centre. In summary all the respondents were aligned with regard the need to understand the system and data architectures as well as having clearly documented business processes end to end. All 8 included in their phase 1 of the project a thorough analysis of the requirements. Some respondents were tool independent. No reference was made to forensics in either the Gartner scope of the project or the responds’ preferred approach and methodology.

My point is this. If the RA community wishes to standardise and unite this profession, we must speak the same language. I have not come across a workplace where this forensic approach to RA is present in the culture or language of the group. Individual enquiries as to its meaning returned either “GRAPA plays in the forensic/fraud field and not pure RA” and “GRAPA means RA as we understand it but it was written/coined by somebody who has a forensic investigation background”.

The beauty of managing a team consisting of RA, Fraud and Law Enforcement personnel is that one gets a glimpse of their cognitive processing and respective approaches to problem solving using a single issue such as the perceived underbilling of wholesale data usage. There is a distinct difference in the mental processes of a forensic investigator and financial analyst. Both these personnel profiles can apply for an RA position. This is the socio-cultural context within which we process our knowledge of RA standards and will necessarily lead to misinterpretation of an otherwise well intended contribution. In change management we are taught to show sensitivity toward diversity. Is this a matter of cultural differences and diversity? If so, what can be done to establish a reliable translator for such term differences? If a job description asks for forensic skills when I really need somebody with an analytical ability, would I be doing a fair evaluation of suitable candidates? 

While working with a Commercial bank in South Africa and Namibia I tried to draw a comparison between revenue assurance in a telco environment and how I imagine it could be done in a banking environment.  Take note of the reference to “tried” here. I have to warn the readers that engaging with a commercial bank to roll out new banking infrastructure in Africa during these financial times takes some doing. There was very little energy left to day dream about revenue assurance.

Limiting this observation to the process of product and system implementation, what is the difference between implementing Amdocs, Singl.eView and Flexcube? Not much except that Flexcube is implemented in the banking industry and not in a telco.  

System stability

A headache for any RA team is tracking usage through unstable systems. Inevitably the finger pointing ensues between 2 departments without either taking accountability for system integrity. When the platform integrity was not assured during the implementation of the system, it is almost impossible to rectify this during production without at least several scars.  The bank’s implementation of the core banking system was no different.  It did however make me realise how often the Revenue Assurance Department picks up the accountability to ensure that system development staff is following Project management 101 principles.

System architecture

I have yet to work for a telco that has the entire system architecture documented in enough detail to follow the basic flow of data. The bank experience again was no different. I did OD work for banks before but this was the first time I was involved in banking operations. As a novice it would have been nice to work through the operating model down to a functional architecture and then consider how the system architecture would support or enable the business objectives. Only a small number of people understood what I was trying to do and I was left again realising the huge gap between technology and human capability. The gap just widens.

Solution design

Many organisations regardless of the industry are forced to do solution design in parallel. This is achieved by continuing work in isolation with the intention of integrating later. The designs are based on assumptions and generally high-level directives usually in the form of an MS Powerpoint slide presented to Exco.  We build the solution from multiple points working in multiple directions and become confused when they don’t tie up.  This again is not telco specific. Banks do it too.

Developing specialised functionality in-house

We are familiar with a few telcos which are forced to (or elect to) design and build their own telco systems, be they an RA automation / verification tool or strangely, a rating and billing engine. I am not a fundi of banking payment systems, but I felt the business architect’s pain when he wrestled with the concern of underlying functionality. Although he did not specifically mention complete and accurate billing, this is what he meant. I guess the term “complete and accurate” is telco specific lingo but the concern is industry independent.  The sheer size and complexity of inter bank, inter country payment settlement would make me think twice before embarking on the in-house development of a payment settlement solution.  The closest I could come to offer help was to suggest we get a system auditor in and that took some explaining.

Project management and communication

Coming back to project management, it is alarming to follow the demise of large programmes (and those chunky budgets gone) due to ineffective project and programme management. The Governance and Internal Audit guys make plentiful visits to check up on the health of the programme but somehow the message misses its audience or perhaps the audience has other realities simply not understood by reality-protected desk job executives…..executives meaning glorified middle management without subordinates.

Product development

Understanding your market and their appetite for certain products is vital to the costing and offering model. Similar to what we know as margin analysis, we would also look at the profitability of certain segments or go further to inform subscribers of more suitable packages to optimise their “bang for the buck”. Products working for one country may not necessarily work in another country and this is not a function of GDP or disposable income. There are nuances to what you sell, which can make or break the bottom line.

On the upside

The volume of customers and complexity of parameters per product do not come close to a telco I worked with so far. Yes, we do have the difference in the size of countries I am referring to here but still, once operational the speed and size of change do not require fulltime revenue assurance people onboard. The company involved has an awesome Fraud department with near real time monitoring of transactions. This knowledge and infrastructure can be replicated into Africa. You can also train a businessperson in the basics of banking without having to turn them into technical superbeings. It is one of the few companies where procedure manuals actual mean something.

As to how they ensure that service charges and interest are calculated correctly, the answer was “I am not sure”. It appears that the customer relationship management is adequate to know your assigned client accounts well enough to know if there is a problem on the account or not.

Personal reflection

A famous quote in impoverished African countries is “Complaining with a white bread under the arm”. This refers to valuing or appreciating what you have. Here is an observation from the revenue assurance starved (moi). We often complain about working with telco execs that battle to grasp the basics of revenue assurance. We spend days dissecting their uninformed decisions and their inability to zoom in and out. When you are unfortunate in the nature of assignment the gods designed for you and you exchange the RA world for something else, you come to miss those dumb executive decisions. You try for a while to marvel in other’s experiences but somehow this is like trying to share a romantic meal for two with your parents.  Value the opportunities you have and help to build this profession into something that other industries will want to copy.

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.