This guest blog is by Alex Leslie, freelance consultant. Alex was the CEO and founder of the Global Billing Association, is a well known speaker at international conferences, and has been widely published in industry journals. We at talkRA keep pace with billing news by following Alex’s Billing Views website; you can see the latest news headlines from Billing Views by looking in the right hand sidebar. For this special blog, Alex recounts a personal story about revenue leakage.

In our industry there is a perception that all our problems and all our solutions are about technology. This is not the case.

Just down a country road near here is a house. In one half of this house lives a farmer, with his wife and daughter. In the other half of the house lives a retired couple.

The retired couple decided to change their phone provider. This involved changing their phone number. The farmer who lives in the other half of the house received a letter saying that the work was going to be done on a certain date. He thought it was considerate of the company to let him know – there might, he thought, be disruption while the work was being done.

The retired couple got their new service and were very happy. The farmer lost his phone service for six weeks. He spent over 12 hours on the phone to the two phone companies that were involved. He got nowhere. Nobody would take the blame or responsibility. The farmer knew that I did ‘something in telecommunications’ and, at the end of his tether, asked me to help.

So, I got cross for him. Someone in his service provider’s chairman’s office took charge and we made progress. It seemed that not only had be lost his service, he had lost his number, which had been archived and lost in the ‘no longer needed number’ database.

It took a month from the moment I got involved to get the service re-instated, including a false start when the farmer got his service back only to lose it again two hours later. It turned out the engineer did not have the right screwdriver.

Apparently this happens quite a lot. A database has a customer’s name on it, followed by an address. There is an assumption (whether technical or human) that the customer is the only occupant of this address. If there is no clue (e.g. Flat 1, Douglas House, or Sunnyview Cottage West) then when someone says they want to change service or change number there is a danger that people will get disconnected.

Once disconnected the service provider will, as in this case, lose six weeks’ revenue, have to pay compensation, suffer the cost of re-instating everything and generally suffer negative PR as well.

This was an example from the quiet, uncluttered countryside. Imagine the chaos (and loss of revenue) if this happened on a housing estate with addresses such Flat 125, Nelson House and the database missed the first part of the address.

Not all our problems are hi-tech ones.

You know, there would not be a discipline called ‘revenue assurance’ if it was not for the pioneers – those brave souls that walked straight ahead when others turned back. You cannot simultaneously blaze the trail whilst sticking with the crowd. We need the mavericks to find different, better ways of getting from A to B – of getting communication providers from where they are now to where they should be. That has always been part of the philosophy of talkRA; we give a few independently-minded individuals a platform so their voices can be distinguished from the chorus.

Of course, the problem with being a trail blazer is that you might not always get sufficient credit. By the time everyone else has caught up, nobody remembers who got there first. One example is David Smith of ABISQ. As the Technical Director of the Global Billing Association, David was an evangelist for revenue assurance before most people had even heard of the discipline. He systematically raised the profile of RA as he travelled the world. Because of David, the GBA introduced RA benchmarks that were years ahead of their time – in my opinion, the industry simply was not ready to capitalize on them. In 2001 David wrote Successfully Managing Revenue Assurance, which was the original blueprint for how to perform revenue assurance. Those of us fortunate to have read it can appreciate how well it has stood the test of time. His follow up work, Margin Management, is a lost classic. Through his efforts, David has had an incalculable impact on the growth of the discipline. Many of David’s ideas have become the mainstream of RA thinking. My guess is that his ideas influenced others around him, both consciously and subconsciously, until they had been repeated to the point where they became common wisdom. That is why I like to call David the godfather of revenue assurance… but only behind his back, because he is too modest to hear me talk that way in front him.

We need new thought leaders too, of course. It was a pleasure to find this new blog from a man who fittingly calls himself ‘Maverick’. Through his blog, the mysterious Maverick shares his thoughts on revenue assurance, revenue management, and a bit of everything else… but is too busy writing about those topics to share much about himself! Maverick says what he thinks, taking aim where he disagrees with conventional wisdom and walking his own path. Good for him. Perhaps, in a decade or so, if he keeps at it, the time will come to remind everyone what Maverick has contributed to the development of best practice…

This is another post in the irregular series on revenue assurance outside of telecoms. The idea of reworking the practice of revenue assurance for energy and other utility businesses has been around for a while. However, the concept of the ‘Revenue Assurance Control Desk’ (RACD) from Kopac Consulting makes the intellectual heritage more explicit than ever before. The RACD borrows from both telecoms revenue assurance and the way manufacturers maintain statistical quality control using the control desk standard. Kopac intend to patent the RACD hybrid for use by utilities and retail energy providers. See here for the press release and how to obtain a free copy of their 82-page guide to RACD.

Regular readers of talkRA will have noticed we had some difficulties over the last week. Hackers found an exploit and were able to inject additional code into some of the files on our host server. The code would have redirected visitors to other sites controlled by the hackers. Thankfully, the hacker’s code has all been stripped and talkRA’s software upgraded as well. In other words, things are back to normal… or as normal as they ever are.

It is worth learning a few lessons from the unpleasant experience. First, if the internet is the digital world’s equivalent of the wild west, then we should not be surprised if some of its inhabitants have taken on the role of law enforcers. In talkRA’s case, Google rode up like Wyatt Earp, showing they have the power to hogtie any threat to peaceful folk. By linking the results of their endless web crawl to the working of browsers, Google have made themselves effective intermediaries in who gets to see what. So, for a while, they told visitors to talkRA to run for cover. This is the current diagnostic page issued by Google on talkRA. Thankfully, it does not say there is a reward out for my capture, alive or dead. What it says is that Sheriff Google found some outlaw code on three pages they visited on August 5th, but everything has been all clear each time they visited since.

The second lesson to learn is that there is never enough security. The bandits are out there, looking out for any opportunities. These particular hackers were not going specifically for talkRA. They attacked everything on the host server. In the internet era, both attack and defence are automated; brute force and repetition means that every vulnerability will be tested sooner or later.

Finally, most hackers do it for the money. That seems to have been the motive for the attack on talkRA. If the hackers are making money, then somebody else is losing. That is bad for communication providers. They either lose directly or their customers lose. If customers lose, they have less money to spend and they become more fearful of using their services.

The internet wild west is still a long way from being domesticated, and may never be. Google try to play the part of peace officers, bringing order in the place of chaos, as best demonstrated by the new joint statement with Verizon on net neutrality. But Google also finds itself in more gun-slinging contests than Billy the Kid. Three stories in the last week bear this out. Premium-rate SMS trojans were found to be infiltrating Google’s Android OS in the wild. A security flaw in Android was discovered which would allow harvesting of a user’s password data. And now Oracle has accused Google of code-rustling. Oracle has launched a law suit, claiming that Android infringes Oracle’s Java patents. Oracle want a pay-off and an injunction that will block the continued distribution of Android, holding Google to ransom. It sure is wild on the digital frontier…

Type the words ‘dale crossman revenue assurance’ into Google this morning, and you will find something you would not have found a few days ago. The top hit takes you to Wikipedia, which tells you that:

The term “Crossman Exposure” is named after a Revenue Assurance Consultant who had worked extensively in quantifying financial risk associated with Revenue Assurance within Telecommunication companies.

Oh, really? It is funny, then, that I have never heard of the “Crossman Exposure” before, or about Dale Crossman and the extensive work Dale has done. Indeed, the whole internet knows little about Dale. Dale Crossman’s only claim to entry in the Revenue Assurance Hall of Fame seems to be the Wikipedia article named after Dale Crossman. I guess that means Dale’s name will go down in the Hall of Shame instead.

Tut, tut. People of RA, we have been down this road before. No self-respecting profession would allow its Wikipedia page to become home for chancers who want to promote themselves by inventing spurious accolades, giving themselves titles or naming things after themselves. First it was cheapskate vendors who thought wedging their company’s name into Wikipedia articles was a respectable way to promote themselves. Then it was Papa Rob Mattison, the President of Global RA Spam. To be fair to him, at least he can claim to be successful in turning spam into a viable business model. Papa Rob used Wikipedia to announce he was the president of his global association of professionals even before it had a single member. In recognition of his breaking of Wikipedia’s rules, Papa Rob was booted off Wikipedia not once, but twice. Now we have Wikipedia spam about Dale Crossman’s contribution to revenue assurance… whoever Dale Crossman is.

Being an auditor at heart, I tried to find out as much as I could about Dale Crossman. We know the person who posted the Wikipedia article has an out of date copy of the TM Forum’s RA Guidebook; the Wikipedia article refers to the 2006 version. That probably means Dale’s company is not a member of the TMF and Dale only has a pirated copy of an old text… which is not a good start for someone wanting to promote their industry knowledge. Indeed, the only reason for the reference seems to be to mislead people into thinking that the “Crossman Exposure” is in the TMF’s guide, which it certainly is not. Beyond that, searching for the name Dale Crossman in the context of revenue assurance only comes up with blanks. So I looked to see what other pages had been edited by the people who had just spammed Wikipedia. Bizarrely, there was exactly one other page edited by the same user… the page about the town of Talbot, Victora in Australia. Might Dale be an Aussie? It seemed I was not getting far. Then I considered that internet users often adopt the same nicknames in different places on the web. Might the person who created this Wikipedia page – with username ‘epacdon’ – have the same username elsewhere? There is an epacdon on eBay in Australia… which is only weak corroboration. There is also an epacdon on an Australian webpage for sharing photos, though the real name of that user is Daniel McDonald, not Dale Crossman. I stepped back and tried a wider search and found that there is a Dale Crossman who works for Ericsson in Australia. He also lives in the same area of Australia as Daniel McDonald. However, the LinkedIn profile for that Dale Crossman makes no mention of revenue assurance. Furthermore, Ericsson is a member of the TMF… so that Dale Crossman could download the updated copy of the TMF’s RA guidebook whenever he liked.

So I give up. The trail is too cold and too tenuous for me to track down Dale Crossman, supposed hero of revenue assurance. If you know about Dale Crossman and his (self-) exposure, please share. After all, there is no point to promoting yourself with spam if afterwards you still remain so obscure that nobody knows who you are. And if you know Dale, be sure to let him know that the Wikipedia page on the “Crossman Exposure” has been flagged for speedy deletion… has been deleted!

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.