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?

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.

Why should Risk Managers make friends with Billing Managers? I can think of three reasons:

• Many risks, if not managed properly, manifest themselves in symptoms captured by the Billing Manager. DSO, billing adjustments, goodwill credits, leakage… the Billing Manager is exposed to many of the indicators of root failures that come back to inadequate operational, financial and sometimes even strategic risk management.
• Billing Managers often end up sympathetic to the need to manage risk, precisely because they are forced to deal with the result of inadequate risk management. Indeed, the development of risk silos like fraud management and revenue assurance is often aided by the Billing function. In many providers, such silos actually grew out of the Billing team.
• We all know of horror stories where the pressure to launch a new product was not matched by enthusiasm to devise a suitable billing solution. I have even known whole communications providers whose ‘revenue assurance’ to-do list could be neatly summarized by one task: implement a proper billing system! If a recurring failure to deliver adequate billing does not count as an example of rotten risk management, then I do not know what does.

One of the greatest causes of uncertainty is lack of information. Not having sufficient data also means risks cannot be quantified. Because Billing is a key nexus of data – bringing together vital information on revenues, direct costs, debts and customer satisfaction – it provides a key resource to aid the management of risk.

It is heartening to see that many Billing Managers are conscious of the advantages of proactive risk management. I recently wrote an article for BillingOSS Magazine about the connections between Enterprise Risk Management (ERM), Billing and the risk silos. The article begins on page 14 and the magazine is available online from here. The connections were also underlined by the TM Forum when setting up a collaborative team working on ERM. The TMF’s ERM team grew out of the TMF’s Revenue Management program. To find out more, you can visit or join the TMF’s ERM community here.

Billing are often left to clean up the mess when upstream decisions, processes, data and systems go wrong. Like so much of life, the people who most appreciate the need to think ahead are the people who otherwise have to deal with the consequences!

As previously rumoured, US cost, routing and revenue management vendor TEOCO has made a formal bid to take over Israeli OSS vendor TTI Telecom. TEOCO is offering USD 3 per share, a premium of 50% that values TTI at USD 58 million, in an all-cash deal that would take TTI off the Nasdaq. However, there is still the prospect of another buyer coming in; TTI may solicit superior offers until July 9, though TEOCO will have the right to match any such offer and would get an undisclosed break-up fee if their offer is ultimately rejected. You can read about the deal in the TEOCO press release.

The combined firm would have over 600 staff and 75 communications provider customers. The deal makes sense for TTI’s shareholders. With significant consolidation in the OSS sector this year, TTI alluded to the competitive challenges as one reason why it is in favour of the deal. TTI CEOs have come and gone in the last few years, but it was unclear if TTI would be able to keep pace with the R&D of rivals and thus develop future growth products. The benefits to TEOCO are less obvious, though I think the key to the deal is that it greatly expands TEOCO’s international footprint. To date, the bulk of TEOCO’s customers are in North America. Acquiring TTI will extend their reach into Europe, Asia and Africa.