It is quite amusing to see that talkRA has now been syndicated on the ‘Revenue Assurance Professionals’ group over at LinkedIn. There is nothing wrong with that – we love that people should read our stuff. Of course, there are some things that cannot be syndicated, like the most recent episode of our podcast involving a panel discussion on the use of data warehouses for RA. Wherever possible, we try to make it as easy as possible to read our material – that is why we do not expect people to register just so we can boast about how many ‘members’ we have. We would rather have real and interested readers than fake and disinterested members. To help our readers, we also provide RSS and Atom feeds to make it easy for people to stay up to date without needing to constantly visit our site. All they need to do is to add the URL to their favourite feed reader; most web browsers now have feed readers built-in. Just in the same way that people can follow the feed on their own PC, other sites can syndicate our feed – a fancy way of saying they automatically copy the content in our feed. This is just what the LinkedIn crowd have started to do, by republishing our content over on their web pages.

I find it amusing that talkRA is being syndicated on LinkedIn. I have written before about why I am not keen on closed environments like LinkedIn that force people to log on before they can read the content. If I write similar criticisms of LinkedIn now, they will be automatically republished over there! On one hand, the closed environments are pretending to be a community: “Join our great party – everybody else has!” On the other hand, they put somebody on the door to control who can enter, but not very much…

“Sorry mate, if your name’s not on my list, you can’t come in.”
“Well how do I get my name on the list?”
“Write your name here.”
“What’s the point of that then?”
“I don’t make the rules, do I?”

It is a walled garden, and the whole point is to get you to visit so they can make money by showing you adverts or persuading you to buy some silly certificate they sell. That model will probably persist quite successfully for another ten years or so, but it is doomed. Why have the software of somebody else mediating, editing, and controlling the content you receive? Why give them your personal information in return? Why be forced to read that content with the adverts they force alongside them? Most importantly, why tolerate that, when the content they provide is just recycled from somewhere else? Think of this way: most of the news websites that people read are just copying from news bureaus who already publish their articles on the web – so why go to a ‘news’ site when you can simply go to the source?

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I was recently going through the recent posts, and one thing I’ve noticed is that we seem to be a bit partial in only addressing issues faced by established operators. Now, I want to initiate a discussion which focuses on Greenfield operators.

Assuming that we had an opportunity to help a new operator (Greenfield Operator) build a RA and FMS practice, what would we inculcate into the “DNA” of the operator from Day 1? The experiment is directly focused on checking the impact of “Early in the Day” enabling of RA and FMS, and to what extent the move would help the operator save on large leakage issues later on. In my opinion, the critical step for the Operator would be to design & decide the RA and FMS framework. The framework should be encompassing all aspects of reporting, tracking, evolution path and integration.My point of view regarding a RA & FMS practice from day 1 would be :

a) Planned integration of new network elements with RA as a test-bed for system accuracy
b) Existing fraudsters who have been active/ejected in other networks would find a Greenfield operator to be a “Soft” target
c) Building up of effective usage patterns for identification of Fraudsters via deviant usage tracking
d) Proactive verification of subscription data flow and sub-systems
e) Ensuring a “leak-proof” work-flow to handle all issues including rectification tracking

Of course, there are many more reasons for a new operator to take advantage of a full-fledged RA and FMS operation. While keeping in mind that Fraud and Revenue Assurance might not be a key component of a new operator’s roll-out strategy, it is also important to keep in mind that prevention is definitely better than cure.

It is absolutely clear to me that having a strong RA and FMS framework in place from Day 1 would definitely help an operator in both the short term as well as the long term. The progressive growth of the network will help the analysts to have a clear understanding of concern areas, as well as building a considerable in-house knowledge base. As a direct result of forward-planning, the in-house teams would also have to implement fairly strong work-flows. Simple errors, like business document version errors, could be foreseen and nipped at the bud.

I could go on and on, but I would be more interested in getting your views on the subject. Specifically, I’m wondering if anyone sees a reason for why a greenfield operator would NOT want to have a RA and FMS framework in place on Day 1.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

For podcast 5, I was joined by not one, but three guests. Mike Willett, Director of Fraud and Revenue Assurance for Telstra, President of the Australasian Telecommunications Fraud and Risk Association, and fellow talkRA blogger, put the kids to bed and dialed in from Australia. Glenn Hovey, ex-Global Revenue Assurance Manager for Vodafone Group, took time out from packing his possessions before he moves home. Last but not least, Guy Howie, Director of Business Intelligence And Assurance Solutions (BIAAS) managed to find a precious half-hour slot between conference calls with his clients. I am grateful to all three for making the time to talk with me. As ever, all opinions expressed are those of the individuals participating, and need not represent the views of their businesses or other organizations they are affiliated to.

For the first debate, Mike, Glenn, and Guy discussed a perennial topic, but one that still causes a lot of disagreement: if, when, and how should RA utilize an enterprise data warehouse? Half an hour was barely long enough to hear what they each had to say. To compensate, I hope they will all participate in many more panel debates for talkRA. You can listen to the podcast by playing or downloading it from talkRA. Better still, subscribe to the podcast at iTunes, and you will never have to worry about missing a future episode.

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.

To a great extent, Revenue Assurance in telecoms was born of the last recession.

Embattled CEOs were finally forced to come clean about the parlous state of internal systems that had expensively been put in place over the previous 10 years. Typically, even those that were fully functional were no longer fit for purpose, and many intra- and inter-departmental processes were broken. Consequently, RA started its life with a boom – ‘low hanging fruit’ were everywhere, and demonstrating the business case for any RA related activity, given even the smallest sign of executive championship, was relative child’s play.

As we enter a new economic cycle – and the exact impact of the Credit Crunch on the increasingly convergent telecoms marketplace has yet to be revealed – RA has consistently demonstrated its worth, but in many operating environments (although certainly not all) the opportunities for easy revenue wins have been much harder to come by. Consequently, whilst RA has by and large retained its primary focus, the temptations for expansion and scope creep have been great.

In the interim, there have been a number of external factors that have had a significant impact on the RA operating environment.

The first has been the drive towards ensuring shareholder value (sometimes even at the expense of business value) through increasing financial governance, ethical business and compliance requirements. Whilst on the one hand this has thrown into sharp relief the need for the business to focus on processes and risk which has in turn undoubtedly bolstered RA awareness, on the other it has not necessarily done RA any favours as it has in some cases subverted RA activity away from its prime directive and into less strategically significant areas such as process management and compliance enablement.

The second has been the trend – both within the CSP community and the supply chain – for aggregation through M&A. This, too, has had an upside and a downside for RA: group-wide systems environments have again become more complex and the opportunities for RA rationalisation with centralised co-ordination, resources and power have increased, but at the same time the opportunity for Group to leverage economies of scale, impose ‘preferred supplier lists’, and demand headcount reductions across its OpCo dominions is increasingly being aided and abetted by ‘RA justification’. Whilst efficiencies can undoubtedly be achieved and in many cases are both necessary and long overdue, the potential impact on RA as it becomes ensnared in Group/OpCo politics is that by having its interdepartmental communications skills and connectivity exploited RA will be returned to an environment where it is treated by the OpCo business units with suspicion, and RA will have become the harbinger of bad news rather than the provider of mission critical assistance in delivering operational effectiveness.

Ultimately, if this approach continues without adequate safeguarding, not only RA’s ‘client’ relationships with target business units, but also its bi-lateral relationships with closely coupled functions such as fraud management, internal audit and risk, will suffer.

The third trend, largely in response to the first two, has been the increasing effort to standardise and quantify all aspects of business and operational processes. Again, the monitoring and risk assessment of business effectiveness has to be a good thing, and for many operators who started with relatively immature business reporting capabilities the ability to ‘actually know what is going on in their business’ has been a revelation. However, these advances also bring with them the potential for business ossification and a tendency for ‘death by KPIs’ in all of its various forms. Not only are operating environments in some CSPs becoming overburdened with quantitative metrics that are inhibiting the potential for very necessary business transformation in the light of changing new generation requirements, but important projects required to deliver new functionality are being inhibited even from consideration in case they conflict with reference architecture models that have become erroneously set in stone.

Moreover, given the huge variability in market penetration and maturity, customer expectations and regulatory responsiveness, together with the status of internal legacy systems and processes experienced by CSPs around the globe, the concept of ‘best practice’ as a determination of implementation suitability and success factors is becoming increasingly harder to justify. Without a doubt ‘best fit’ has become a much better guiding principle, but this is and will always remain a subjective judgement call. One size definitely does not fit all.

A further problem in this respect has been the levels of understanding at senior management level (and elsewhere within the business) about the nature of standards themselves, and the adoption of an attitude that has assumed that technical process standards developed at the network layer and business process standards developed at the IT and business layers are methodologically the same, and that they can be treated, managed and developed in the same way. This is clearly not the case, and as a consequence – the stirling efforts of the TMF RA Working Group notwithstanding – the overall status of standards evolution within the BSS domain in particular remains something of a mess.

The fourth trend has been a response to the perceived success of RA itself, and indeed to RA’s own attempts to expand its scope. Having successfully secured a degree of proactive control over leakage across a wide range of operational areas, many RA professionals – particularly those in more mature markets – have looked beyond RA towards a more strategic role with a broader level of influence on business operations. Areas such as input to and even sign-off on new product development, increasing engagement in marketing and sales activities, and the development of consistent approaches to 3rd party management and revenue share settlement, are all coming within the remit of this expanded RA sphere of relevance. Moreover, given the huge variability in market penetration and maturity, customer expectations and regulatory responsiveness, together with the status of internal legacy systems and processes experienced by CSPs around the globe, the concept of ‘best practice’ as a determination of implementation suitability and success factors is becoming increasingly harder to justify. Whilst on the one hand best practice is a useful benchmark for both ISVs and CSPs to aim at as a reflection of how a specific function can be best optimised, on the other, the fact that Analysts point at a particular solution as ‘the way to go’ does not necessarily mean it will be optimum in every operating (and legacy) environment, and most certainly it does not necessarily offer a guarantee of optimised ROI, either in the short or long term. Without a doubt ‘best fit’ has become a much better guiding principle, but this is and will always remain a subjective judgement call. One size definitely does not fit all.

A further problem in this respect has been the levels of understanding at senior management level (and elsewhere within the business) about the nature of standards themselves, and the adoption of an attitude that has assumed that technical process standards developed at the network layer and business process standards developed at the IT and business layers are methodologically the same, and that they can be treated, managed and developed in the same way. This is clearly not the case, and as a consequence – the stirling efforts of the TMF RA Working Group notwithstanding – the overall status of standards evolution within the BSS domain in particular remains something of a mess.

Billing is a good example. As a technical function there are technical standards for device interfaces that can be adopted; there are also process standards that optimise the implementation of these interfaces. However, billing processes also encompass a wide range of business activities that are dependent on intangible non-technical factors – particularly those that affect customer interaction and marketing. In these areas billing policy is as closely related to corporate positioning and brand management as it is to the underlying platforms on which these processes are enacted. Technical disciplines can be highly effectively managed by technical process standards, but to assume that profitability can be guaranteed by the application of technology-based billing processes to the wider domain of revenue management as a business operation is likely to end in tears.

Unfortunately, at the same time, almost every software vendor across the OSS and BSS domains has laid claim to offering complete or near-complete RA capabilities within their product offerings, often under the banner of Revenue Management. Whilst some of these offerings are genuine (and the need to embed core RA functionality into all operational systems is becoming a necessity for new generation product management and risk amortisation), many are not, and most are primarily designed to reposition the functional set of their product suites on offer across more ‘strategically significant’ dimensions. In addition, of course, all of the usual ‘Guardian of the Gatekeeper?’ questions still arise. From a pure RA perspective, this muddying of the waters is not helping.

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