One difficulty with revenue assurance is the preponderance of metaphors that people use when talking about it. These metaphors may help with explaining the purpose of revenue assurance, especially in the absence of good public data to prove the point. However, all metaphors have their limits, and they can also lead to misunderstanding. Take the metaphor of a ‘leak’ for example. Water goes in one end of a pipe, and comes out the other end. Not as much comes out the other end, because some is lost through leaks. Okay, but does this explain leaks caused by errors in rating? If water pipes could have rating errors, you might end up with more water coming out than went in…

Despite this, I am as guilty as anyone of using metaphors. In case you do not believe me, let me introduce you to one of my favourites. J.F. Kennedy said:

The time to repair the roof is when the sun is shining.

If that is true, than an economic downturn should be worst for any telcos that have not already invested in revenue assurance, and less of a trouble to those that have. But I expect most vendors will be thinking the other way around… ‘look the roof is leaking! and it’s pouring with rain! better pay someone to get up there and fix it now!’ I think the problem with JFK’s metaphor is pretty apparent. Any time is a good time to fix the roof. When the rain comes pouring in through your roof, fixing it will be harder, but that does not mean you can afford to sit and wait until the sun is shining again.

That is one way to interpret the metaphor. On that reading, vendors would be roof-menders, and if a telco has not mended their roof already, they had better get a vendor and do it now. But there is another way to apply this metaphor to revenue assurance. Now, I do not know about you, but if I paid someone to fix a roof, I would not expect that the roof still needed fixing on a daily basis forever more. If it did, I would probably argue that the roof had not been fixed properly to begin with. If the roof was fixed, there would be no leaks. I could sit snug and warm and dry, and not worry about it. I would not be walking around my house, looking up at the ceiling, and saying “where is the next leak going to come from?” I would not look up, find a leak, put a pan underneath to collect the drops, and start commenting to my family: “look at all this water we have collected - what a victory for our anti-leakage program!” In short, if you fix the roof properly, the job is at an end, and you can stop worrying. There is no ongoing benefit, because there are no more leaks. You would not employ a team of people to keep looking up at the roof, ready to raise the alarm and run with a pan to recover the rainwater.

If we stick to this second way of interpreting the phrase, what would fixing the roof mean? It would mean building (or re-building) the roof so nothing went wrong. It does not mean waiting to see if something goes wrong, but spending a lot of time and money trying to deal with the consequences. A leak is, purely and simply, a mistake. Fixing the roof thus means having a business which does not make mistakes. Its decision-making processes are lined up correctly, just like the tiles on a roof should be lined up correctly. Each decision fits the needs of the business. Whether a big decision (how should we price this new product?), or a small decision (where does the decimal point go in this new rate to be implemented?), the right decision is made. People take care to avoid mistakes, just like the roofer is careful to ensure the roof will not leak. Because individual people may not be reliable, you ensure the way they work is designed to avoid mistakes. That is what fixing the roof means to me - but it has nothing to do with what the vendors sell.

This week I read a news story about how obese people wasted a lot of money on products that misleadingly promise to help them lose weight, but which do no such thing. That got me thinking. There is a simple reason why the pharmaceutical industry is always looking for drugs to solve every problem that a person can have. Drugs can obviously be monetized. Whether the patient pays, or their insurance pays, or a taxpayer pays, then somebody pays for every single pill. In contrast, prevention is not easily monetized. It is harder to make money from telling people to take some exercise, eat well, and take care of their body. It is easier to make money by waiting until people get sick and then stuffing them full of drugs. On the flip side, insurance firms and healthcare services recognize that they will spend a lot less money if people try to be healthy, and spend a lot more money if they do nothing about it. It is worth remembering that big tobacco in the US was eventually forced to admit the consequences of smoking because individual states had pursued them with huge bills for healthcare costs.

Here comes another one of my favourite metaphors, and this one is especially for the revenue assurance industry. Health is wealth, and plugs are drugs. A healthy business is a wealthy business, because the fundamentals of operations are sound. Mistakes are not made, so money is not lost. The job of revenue assurance in these companies is to promote health, by promoting prevention as superior to cure. On the other hand, plugs are drugs. Leaks are a symptom, so plugging them gives instant relief. A business that spends all its effort plugging leaks is a business addicted to the drug of fixing a problem, but may do so at the expense of not addressing the underlying causes. The business is sick, but deals with the symptoms of illness, instead of becoming well. The drug is addictive because there is an obvious and measurable benefit. However, life with those benefits is wrongly compared to life without those benefits. That is like persuading a sick man to keep popping pills because he will suffer more without them. Instead, the benefits of popping pills should be compared to the benefits of being healthy. The sick man should also look at the cost of his drugs and change his lifestyle so he does not need them in future. Prevention is better than cure. The question for the revenue assurance industry is which do they prefer to sell - health or cure? Are we trying to make the difficult but virtuous sell of promoting the equivalent of healthy living for telcos? Or are we happy just to push the drugs and make money by exploiting the sick? ;)

In my opinion, we have an awesome team of revenue assurance bloggers contributing to talkRA (and I am not just saying that because I am one of them.) In a few short months, we have established our formula for promoting the development of revenue assurance. The team comes from all backgrounds - telcos, vendors, consultants - and from all over the world. Crucially, the authors are doing something very different to anything found elsewhere. Instead of playing safe, the talkRA team is pushing back the boundaries of debate and moving the discipline forward as they do. They say you cannot make an omelette without breaking eggs. If that is true, then this crew are cooking up the future of revenue assurance, and it tastes good.

The talkRA team are masters of their domain. But even a team as strong as talkRA’s will occasionally make room for a new member. I am very excited to announce that Hugh Roberts has agreed to join talkRA. Most of you will know who Hugh is already, but for the rest, let me briefly mention some highlights. Amongst his many roles, Hugh is a seasoned and prolific commentator and journalist, with over 150 articles and 300 public presentations to his name. Hugh is Senior Strategist for Patni Telecoms Consulting, is a Non-Exec Board Member of Teleonto, and is Consultant Director for BSS/OSS and Revenue Management at IIR, the conference company. As part of this latter role, Hugh serves as Chairman of the World Billing Awards. During his career, Hugh has been a genuine thought leader who has consistently remained ahead of the curve. It is a privilege to have him on the talkRA team.

I love the LinkedIn group that Morisso Taieb set up for revenue assurance. However, there is one thing that frustrates me about it. Many of the questions being asked have already been asked - and answered - many times before. There are all sorts of public forums on the internet, and many of the questions seen in Morisso’s LinkedIn group cover well-worn topics like “where should RA be in the organization chart?” and “what is the scope of RA?” which, although good questions, are going to have answers which do not change very often. It seems to me a shame that new answers keep been written from scratch, when good answers already exist somewhere on the internet. Some of these questions have even been answered elsewhere in LinkedIn. Having a forum with questions and answers is one thing, but having some memory for which questions have been asked, and what answers were given, would be a leap forward. Think of it as the Google principle: you can make the world a much better place not just by creating content - much of which will just replicate existing content - but by finding a way to search through the content that already exists.

Where am I going with this? I am not sure entirely. I know that if revenue assurance does not develop a collective memory, it is doomed to ask, and answer, the same questions over and over. For example, if the LinkedIn group remains as it is, there is the danger that, a year down the line, new people will join, asking the same questions as previously answered. This will be boring and frustrating for people who have been active on the forum that whole time. This is one of the challenges for open group activities using the internet - how to integrate new members whilst sustaining old ones. Some just close themselves to new members, or become so wrapped in their own world that nobody new feels welcome or wants to join. Others remain accessible to new members, but at the price of never progressing, which leads older members to lose interest.

I have an analogy for this experience, one that I take from traditional mass media, specifically television. I am British, but I am a fan of two overseas sports: American NFL football, and Japanese sumo. Of course, being British, I am not going to go to the US or Japan just to see sport on a regular basis, so my primary mode of watching these sports is through television. Because they are not familiar in either country, a lot of the specifically British television coverage focuses on introducing and explaining the game to new viewers, which is fine when you are a new viewer… but not when you move beyond that stage, and are wanting more in-depth analysis and news coverage. That is where the frustration begins, as there may not be good alternative resources to turn to. Either you stick with the same introductory-level presentation, or perhaps you try to jump ahead and watch imported coverage, whilst trying to understand the full-fat presentation given to the more sophisticated audiences in the US and Japan respectively. Where this analogy breaks down is that, for my sports watching, at least those really advanced resources exist somewhere on the planet. That is not the case for revenue assurance. The RA community needs to build them first, and its best chance of doing so is to not get stuck in an interminable loop of introductory debates.

So what is the solution? I am not sure. Perhaps a company like LinkedIn will keep on releasing more functionality, and that will help to solve the problem. I could suggest that talkRA becomes a broader resource, but going beyond the existing search and archive functionality will be a lot more work. I am conscious of the extra effort it would take to aggregate answers from a wider collection of sources. Whoever does tackle this problem, will either be in a closed group and hence there will be limited visibility of what they are doing, or they will face problems with spam. Let us not forget that Papa GRAPA Rob Mattison spammed the Wikipedia page on revenue assurance to the point where it had to be ripped down permanently by Wikipedia’s administrators. Another problem is covering the cost of the effort involved in maintaining and managing any collective resource. Wikipedia depends on donations and goodwill from volunteers. A similar resource for a commercial study like revenue assurance will inevitably tempt people to manipulate it for gain, and even fair and reasonable advertising for any given vendor will likely discourage involvement from anybody representing a rival company.

So there you have it. I have posed a problem - how to generate a memory for revenue assurance - for which I have no answers. Anyone care to make a suggestion? I promise, whatever answers you give, I will not let them be forgotten ;)

This post is not so much a commentary but more a call out for some assistance.

Imagine that your telco has 1,000 corporate customers, all with individually negotiated tariffs across the full set of products and services you provide. The details reside in multiple contracts and variations with discounting provided at many different levels - service, product, account, location - all dependent on what is negotiated with the customer. This has resulted in a mix of standard and customised pricing structures and solutions within the billing environment to meet the contractural obligations for charging.

Now imagine, you are asked to provide revenue assurance validation over these customers to state that there is neither over nor undercharge or, if there is, to identify it precisely so it can be addressed. One way is to extract the bills, extract each contract and then compare the billing system output with what is expected based on the contract. However, this is often a cumbersome process that takes time and effort and, due to the individual nature of each contract, there is very little room to extrapolate the findings from one customer across to all.

My question is, how would you go about providing revenue assurance in this instance?

I guess in a way I repeat myself. I admit I cannot help it. Returning just a couple of days ago from the US, and experiencing the impact of the financial crisis, is beyond any impression I can get from media reports and commentaries.

The US; a small town in Florida. A meeting on a Monday morning. An agenda, open issues, action items and all those mundane topics which you find in every meeting. However this time it was somewhat different. This time you see the faces of people that, instead going into through the listed issues, simply don’t care about the agenda. Instead, they discuss, in length, the breaking news of the morning: layoffs of 53,000 Citibank employees. Later that day, nobody was sure how to comment when CNN reported that, for the first time in its history, GM had stopped paying its dealers due to cash shortages. The gravity of the situation now leaves little room for imagination.

My personal view is that this crisis is far from reaching its bottom. Americans have maybe started to understand the scale of it, but there is still a long way to go before they fully comprehend. They still drive huge cars (by the standards of the rest of the world), care little about energy and do almost nothing about switching to sustainable energy sources. Nobody seems to be installing solar panels on the roofs of the houses in sunny Florida. The American car industry, which is one of the prime pillars of the American economy, is doing badly. American cars are sold mainly in the US and fail in international markets, because of their size, mediocre reliability and rather unappealing design. In California, the prevailing cars are no longer American-made. Korean, Japanese, and German manufacturers have taken their place. The American car manufacturers must understand what has gone wrong, or else they will suffer the same fate as the British automobile industry, which received generous government aid and ended by being sold for less then the value of its debts.

Meanwhile, the average white collar, middle class American is still overly concerned with the cost of a cup of cappuccino at Starbucks. On average, they spend $1200 a year on Starbucks’ hot water and coffee beans. Until they change their priorities, the effects of any economic stimulus will not radiate across the whole economy. At least this is my view. So far, no financial magazine expressed any interest in these views of mine…

However, along the same lines, all telcos and vendors are lowering their revenue forecasts. Sprint announced a new package – everything for $99.99/month. No small print. Unlimited everything - calls, SMS, MMS and data. I guess Sprint will soon be joined by others in the race to offer the best “eat as much as you can” offers.

The papers, any papers, even in a small town in Florida are filled with advice - on how to promote your value within your corporation. They are all full of recommendations on how to be a ‘big picture’ person, on how to justify your job, on how to… yada yada…

Where does revenue assurance fit into this new world order? In my previous blog I discussed the role of RA and where it stops. I’m afraid it was indeed a bedtime story. I would like to challenge the RA managers and ask them how they wish to justify their job when telcos start to adopt an ISP mentality and offer unlimited bundles of everything. What is the cost of the marketers offer? I hope someone did the “fear-greed” analysis prior to launch. Needless to say, I hope it was the RA manager that took up the challenge and questioned the level of profitability in front of the Board of Directors. Otherwise, unless I am missing something, why would anyone see a need for RA in this new régime? I sincerely hope that RA managers can reinvent themselves, and remain relevant.

Decision time is here. GRAPA has thrown down the gauntlet and put its standards and certification program to a vote. There are only two hitches. First, you have to already be registered with GRAPA to vote. There is no way to vote ‘no’ unless you are first added to the list of members - a list which is itself used to legitimize GRAPA to the unwary. Second, no minimum threshold has been announced for the vote. No matter how few votes there are, the result will be final. That means that if only four people vote for the program, and none vote against, we can assume the program will still be ‘ratified’, even though such a ratification would be meaningless.

It is no surprise that GRAPA has once again failed to follow best practice. This time, they have done so by holding a public vote without any transparency or oversight. Even if the ballot is only taken by GRAPA members, they could have easily have improved its credibility by involving an independent body in the management or supervision of the vote. Add to that the fact that, whichever way people vote, it is inevitable that Papa Rob will keep asking the question until he gets the ‘yes’ he is looking for. With an approach like that, perhaps the EU should draft GRAPA in to help run future referendums…

That leaves only two questions for you. First, will you register with GRAPA and vote? And if so, will you vote for, or against?

If you’re new to RA and looking for some help, here’s three top tips to put on your “to do” list:-

1. Use the framework in the TM Forum’s Maturity Model (GB941b) to assess maturity of business activities to deliver revenue assurance objectives in your organization. Pull together an action plan to progress to a higher level.
2. Go through the inventory of leakage points in Section 6.3 of the TM Forum’s RA Guide Book (GB941) to identify gaps and weaknesses in controls. This list can also be used to help standardize RA reporting across a multinational organization. A useful case study published on the TM Forum’s website can be found here.
3. Set yourself targets using the TM Forum’s Guide Book on KPIs (GB941a).

This is not a definitive guide on RA but will help you structure a programme of improvements.

I think the easiest way to explain why setting a fixed rate KPI against revenue reclamation doesn’t work is to first look at a couple of  revenue loss scenarios per revenue stream

One Off System Faults 

• A pre-pay billing system collapses for a period of time, during that period all calls are free.  Recovery 0%
• A post-pay billing system collapses for a period of time, during that period no calls are rated. The CDR’s can be re-processed and recovery is 100%

Erroneous Reference Data

• A pre-pay billing system is rating calls at 1p instead of 10p. You can’t back bill. Recovery 0%
• A post-pay rating engine is rating calls at 1p instead of 10p, dependant on local regulations, duration of issue, company politics etc Recovery 0 to 100%

Now just from the above couple of examples, it’s plain to see that there is a drastic difference between recovery in pre-paid revenue loss to that of post paid revenue loss. This is mainly due to the fact that pre-paid recovery is rare(not impossible), so therefore when defining recovery KPI’s the first thing you need to do is seperate your revenue streams.

What is Recovery?

This seems like an easy/obvious answer - however when you bring in the subject of opportunity loss, is it so clear?  Well, can you recover an opportunity loss? - some people will say that because there is no billing error with an opportunity loss just a service prevention, there is no revenue to recover. However others will say, that by enabling the service to be used, the revenues that are achieved going forward are the recovery. The debate then grows into: if forward billing is classified as recovery, do we therefore have to track all customer accounts forever and if so how can we have KPI’s?  This debate can escalate exponentially and until there is a standard definition, any work on KPI’s and other standard measures is pointless.

I personally believe that to make life simple, recovery can only relate to revenues already lost(the stuff in the past) for resolution of opportunity losses and the ongoing revenues from fixing a recovery I would term these as Benefits. (Please note I’m really watering things down here, there are many more Benefits that need to be defined like OPEX and CAPEX savings resulting from any resolution)

Does Maturity Impact Recovery?

Of course it does!

I’m not going to write too much here(I’ve already written more than I’d wanted to), but quite simply the level of maturity of a function dictates the types of Revenue Loss that’s identified and as we’ve already seen “type” dictates recovery.

Summing Up

If we define recoverable leakages as being the moneys that should have been billed, but for some reason haven’t. Then what we are looking at is something we really have no control over. Pre-paid revenues generally can’t be recovered and post paid revenues are so wrapped up in regulations and customer choice that again we have little or no control over reclaiming this money. What we do have control over are the Benefits, every attempted recovery should have an associated benefit no matter what the type of loss

I’m sure that the headline of “Operators Recover Only a Third of Indentified Revenue Leakages” is statistically about right if you exclude all of the un-recoverable loss types stated above. Ultimately though, in the case of the majority of African Operators (99% prepaid), what you are talking about less than 1%(financially) of issues they will identify, therefore the KPI is pretyy much pointless.

If we want to look at Revenue Assurance as a whole, then a better study would be to look at All of the assoicated Benefits of each revenue leakage prevented/recovered 

“There’s a sucker born every minute” - Phineas T. Barnum

Okay, those of you familiar with my previous blogs know what I think of Papa Rob Mattison and Global Revenue Assurance Professional’s Association (GRAPA). For you, there is no need to read on unless you enjoy a good Mattison-bashing (I know many of you do). The rest of you should and must read on. It is the only way to hear the other side of the story, the side you will never hear from GRAPA, because GRAPA is not a democracy, and not a genuine professional association.

Papa Rob Mattison, the lifetime President and Grand Wizard of GRAPA, (also known as the owner of GRAPA and its related commercial enterprises) has written some new stuff on the “news” page of his new-look GRAPA site. It essentially says you should pay him (and/or other members of his family) for a certificate because GRAPA will really show you, as a person, how to do your revenue assurance job. It also says that GRAPA is not really in competition with the TMF because the TMF, unlike GRAPA, only works for its members and not for the industry as a whole. Also, Rob says the TMF only writes standards about computers and KPIs and has no advice about how people do their jobs. Is this true? No. But some suckers might believe it.

Here is a quick recap of the history of GRAPA so far. Papa Rob wakes up one morning and says to himself, “I have written lots of books on lots of topics, but I need more money. How shall I get it?” He decides to set up a website, calls it a professional association, and uses it to promote his training courses. He calls himself “President”. People who go on his training courses will get a ‘certificate’ endorsed by his professional association. Somehow, by a miracle not properly understood by anyone outside of the Mattison family, the syllabus of the training course they previously wrote is a perfect match to the certification requirements that the ‘industry’ (in the shape of GRAPA) independently decides. What a fortunate coincidence! Otherwise Papa Rob would find himself disagreeing with what the ‘industry’ thought or having to rewrite his training courses.

Lack of knowledge is not an obstacle to Papa Rob. He express views and writes books about many topics, claiming to be an expert at all of them. Ignorance certainly does not prevent Papa Rob from giving some insights about the TMF’s work on revenue assurance. Even though he admits he has no actual involvement with the TMF (although his consulting business does sell business advice about TMF standards) he is still prepared to give a detailed comparison between the work of GRAPA with that of the TMF’s RA team. There is only one problem: he does not know what the TMF’s RA team are working on. I am in the team, and even I find it hard to keep track unless I dial in to the regular team conference calls. The team’s material gets developed over many years by dedicated individuals (not some self-appointed President, not by people who sign up over the internet and instantly expect their first comment to become part of a professional standard). The TMF team’s material only gets released following a stringent multi-stage approval process. So if Papa Rob says that the TMF is only concerned with software and systems, you can trust him… to not know what he is talking about. By the way, I know that the TMF’s RA team works on plenty of other things. I spent four years, several of those whilst I was an employee of telcos, helping the team construct a self-assessment of revenue assurance maturity. The idea that the TMF is only interested in computer systems and KPIs is a lie, pure and simple.

On the GRAPA website, Papa Rob also shared a list of the companies that work in the TM Forum. His analysis concluded that, in the TMF, telcos have insufficient involvement. He got the list from the TMF’s website. Now, every so often [sigh] I moan to the TMF why they do not do a better job of updating their website, but I guess they are busy with other things - you know, things like actually building an industry consensus and running a real international organization and time-consuming stuff like that. According to Papa Rob, only one telco actually works with the TMF’s RA team. WRONG! That list is out of date. That list stems back to when the team was first formed in 2004. I should know, I was working for that telco and joined the TMF’s RA team when it first formed. Back then the comparable list of GRAPA members was… none, because GRAPA did not exist in 2004. So, in 2004, if the TMF had only one telco working on RA, it was still one more than GRAPA had. Since 2004, the TMF has added a lot more active telco members! But Papa Rob does not know that, because he has never been involved. Unfortunately, that does not stop him forming an opinion and sharing his (lack of) knowledge with the rest of the world.

This new ‘letter’ from Papa Rob is an example of his research. Is this the quality of research you would expect from a professional? If he makes unjustified and inaccurate claims about others, can you trust the rest of his research, and can you trust what he says about himself?

If you do not believe that the TMF has got more than one telco actively engaged, just look at what people are doing in the industry. My last blog was about an article written by Einar Nymoen of Telenor. I know Einar because we worked together on the revenue assurance maturity model. Einar eloquently explains how Telenor used the maturity self-appraisal and other TMF guidance to implement benchmarks across its international group. Was Telenor on the list of telcos mentioned by Rob? No! The reason is that Papa Rob used a list that is out of date. Do the benchmarks used by Telenor only relate to computer systems. No! The maturity appraisal alone covers all the aspects of revenue assurance: people, organization, process, tools and influence. So where does Papa Rob get his information from? If he wants to do some research about what is happening in revenue assurance, he should begin by reading talkRA - a site that gives real information away, for free, with no selling of certificates, and no need to register your email address and get spammed forever after.

According to Papa Rob, his information came from “several GRAPA members who also belong to the TMF”. Who are these people? Instead of seeing Papa Rob writing on the front page of GRAPA’s site, we should see what these people have to think. For example, perhaps these TMF members should explain how GRAPA managed to get industry consensus amongst so many telcos so quickly, when the TMF finds it hard and slow to get agreement? Is it because they have some special way to reach this consensus, or is it because their consensus is a sham?

Papa Rob is right about some things (gasps of amazement!) The TMF is slow. Being slow is sometimes the price for letting people have points of view and disagree with each other. The TMF is also poor at marketing its revenue assurance work. For the TMF, revenue assurance is part of something much, much bigger - a view of all telco processes and systems. I agree that the TMF has too few telcos actively involved in its RA program, but it has more active involvement than GRAPA will ever have. GRAPA, unlike the TMF, is fast. They market heavily on the internet and by email and can promote their work very quickly. They claim to have reached industry consensus on certification in less time than it would take a dozen people to agree the best way to make a cup of tea. They then do a deal with Papa Rob’s training company, which sells the training and certification on behalf of GRAPA - what a clever way to ensure GRAPA is “not for profit”! GRAPA is cheap, because they intend to make money from training and certification, so they cannot afford to wait years for people to actually reach agreement. GRAPA has lots of members, including people in telcos, if you measure the number of email addresses that get registered as users, but which never log on again. GRAPA has very few active telco members, if you look to see who is actually participating. I notice that the executive committee of telco members is no longer listed on GRAPA’s site. For years the website listed people in jobs who, when I asked them, said they never spoke with Papa Rob or anyone else on the so-called committee. What kind of committee is that? Some of them had changed their jobs, but kept on being listed under their old titles. That tells you what you need to know about GRAPA’s membership and how it is run.

Everybody around the world knows what a President is. The world saw what a new President looks like after the recent US election. The USA voted for a black President, Barack Obama, for the first time. In a real democracy, things can change. One of the founding fathers said this of the United States:

“Here, sir, the people govern; here they act by their immediate representatives” - Alexander Hamilton

GRAPA has a ‘President’ as well. Presidents are supposed to represent their members. So ask yourself, GRAPA members, did you vote for your President? When will you next get to vote on the President? If you, as a professional, disagree with Papa Rob, is your voice heard? Can you stand against him in an election? If the syllabus of his training course is wrong, can you get it changed? Or do you just pay your money for your certificate, and take what you are given from your masters, without having any voice, or any vote? Just how valuable is that certificate, if everyone else can buy it too? Are you a member, a sucker or a slave?

Alexander Hamilton was talking about a democracy that, 200 years later, selected a black man to be President. In a democracy, things can change. Men, once treated as slaves because of the colour of their skin, can become Presidents. So if you believe in GRAPA, and think it is a democracy, I encourage you to change it. Start asking questions. Start proposing your own changes to the syllabus. Ask why only Mattison’s training company is affiliated to GRAPA, and why other training companies are not welcome. Ask where the money from certification is going - they offer certificates in auditing after all! Ask what you benefits you will receive when you are certified. Do not be slaves, or suckers. Be free men. People like me cannot change GRAPA from the outside, and I am not allowed to join. Yes, I tried to join GRAPA! I hate GRAPA, but I tried to join it, because you can only change things if you participate. But the family Mattison, who control GRAPA and decide everything for it, would not let me join their “industry consensus” party. In a democracy, there is freedom of speech. That is why I am not a member of GRAPA. GRAPA is not a democracy, and that needs to be said.

Look here for a great article by Einar Nymoen of Telenor. He explains how the Telenor Revenue Assurance Program (TRAP) has adopted strategic measures for revenue assurance across the Telenor group. These measures include a KPI for revenue coverage and the TMF’s Revenue Assurance Maturity Model.

Programs like Einar’s are proof that systematic modeling of the performance and evolution of revenue assurance is not just talk and theory - it is industry best practice.