Home
About Black Swan Editorial Mission Reports & Papers
Fraud Systems SIM Box Roaming Fraud PBX Fraud Subscription Databases
RA Practices Business Assurance RA Maturity RA Consulting Bill Testing
Wholesale Systems Net Inventory Margin Assure Partner Mgmt
Customer Behavior Machine Learning Network Analytics Marketing Analytics
Network Behavior Mobile & IoT Security Trusted Communication Signaling
Email a colleague    

June 2011

What Are the Proper Boundaries of Revenue Assurance Software and Organizations?

interview with Güera Romo

What Are the Proper Boundaries of Revenue Assurance Software and Organizations?

When you start a small business, one of the first lessons you learn is: Take most “expert advice“ with a grain of salt.

Lawyers, accountants and landlords all want a piece of you.  The printing shop recommends three times more letterhead and business cards than you need.  And if it had its way, the phone company would sell you a full-page display ad in the Yellow Pages and two or three extra landlines.  If you follow all this advice, your young company will surely fail.  I know from which I speak.  Ask me about it sometime.

Telecoms face the exact same dilemma — how do I see through a supplier’s self-interest in selling me software, systems and consulting?  How do I make strategic software purchases in B/OSS and revenue assurance that allow my business to grow and not waste money on the unnecessary?  And a related question is: What departments in my telecom organization should be responsible for the business functions that employ these supplier tools and services?

As you well know, answering these key questions is the subject of countless magazine articles, blog columns and industry reports.  And trying to sort out all the opinions you’ll find as you investigate these issues requires a level of intellectual passion that few of us can muster.

But yesterday I spoke to Güera Romo, a woman who has taken telecom revenue assurance to this higher philosophical plane.  In the past two years, she’s done a deep-dive investigation of RA organizations and management as part of her Master’s thesis at the University of Johannesburg.  What makes her study even more relevant is that Güera is no ivory tower professor.  She’s lived and breathed RA as a consultant and an RA line manager at operators in South Africa, such as Telkom SA (Pty) LTD, Cell C Mobile and MTN SA.

Dan Baker: Güera, this academic journey of yours is fascinating.  Tell us how you got involved in this.

Güera Romo: Dan, my background is in industrial psychology, which basically studies how people work together and what makes for effective organizations.  But I’m working for my degree in the engineering school here.  So I view my mission as bringing some scientific rigor of thinking to revenue assurance organizations.

In the course of my research, I’ve tried to get my hands on anything and everything that’s been written about RA.  So I analyzed thousands of pages of information from seminars, industry associations, online articles and industry guideline bodies such as the TMF and GRAPA.  Then, using a simple coding method, I came up with 300 concepts that form a provisional taxonomy of RA.  My doctorate study looks at RA maturity, its organizational benefits and the origins of the RA practice.

At a fundamental level, RA departments arose because billing and operations found it too difficult to get their act together.

I agree with that.  RA is a function that compensates for tasks not being done in the rest of the organization.

Some vendors, for example, are advocating that RA tools re-rate 100 percent of call usage to verify accuracy.  But why is it that the original billing system doesn’t have sufficient quality controls and sampling to do a good job of auditing itself?  We need to go back to the root cause of why these functions are not happening in operations.

Why isn’t RA a learning or training session where you test and train on new service models?  You learn what needs to be learned, then take that learning back into operations.

And another key question: Why does the telecom industry — and this industry alone — have a separate function looking after the revenue assurance function?  The banking or manufacturing industries don’t feel a need for this.

Certainly one major problem telcos face is the divide between customer-facing systems and network-facing systems (BSS vs.  OSS).  Banks and manufacturers have it relatively easy.  Money can be easily represented in a database and automobile parts are tangible things that live in one location and can be physically counted.  Networks, on the other hand, are baffling entities to say the least.  They are both physical, logical, and elastic in capacity, plus a service spans many equipment, servers, cables and airwaves.  So how do you accurately relate orders and contracts to network complexity on the backend?

Even recognizing the gap between networks and customer systems, I honestly believe that poor management and performance monitoring is causing many of the problems that RA picks up after.

Take something as simple as a file arriving late from mediation, which is needed to do rating.  Why would you need a secondary person to come in and check that all the files arrived on time and were complete?  Why can’t the persons doing rating and mediation integrate with each other?  One time, as a line manager, I introduced two people to each other whose systems automatically interfaced.  Yet the people didn’t know each other.

And this points to a lack of accountability and that’s what needs to be changed.

Where do you feel vendors sometimes go too far in their zeal to sell more capabilities and software?

Well, at least two of the RA software vendors are now selling the concept of Collections Assurance.  It sounds good, but it lacks a foundation in the organization structure or map of what people should be doing.

RA has some legitimate boundaries and value, but don’t throw in things like collections assurance because the people in the collections department are being paid to do that.  If you appoint an RA analyst to check up on the collections manager, not only is it fundamentally wrong, it’s an insult.

So when software companies propose a new system for RA, I wonder if they’ve thoroughly thought through the organizational implications of that.

And of course, the large services firms pick up on these things, conduct surveys, and write their industry papers.  Then,  before you know it, “collections assurance“ is touted as a must-have system.

Here’s the point: The software vendors are truly adding value, but they often overestimate their value proposition.  Their solutions are not as lucrative as they paint them to be.

So where do you draw a line in the sand?  What is a legitimate job for RA and what is not?

I think each telecom needs to examine that question on its own, but it’s important to recognize that if RA oversteps its functional boundaries and tries to assume too much power, it could do more damage than good.

For any business function that RA takes on, it’s worth asking: Why is the division that’s supposed to do this, not doing it?  Is it because it’s not being managed properly?  Has it become convenient for someone else to tell you where you missed something?

I know that collaboration is needed to get the job done, but it’s very hard to assign any real responsibility to a team.  After all, we recruit and employ individuals.  We don’t recruit and employ a team.  I think it’s time for CSPs to acknowledge they have some big issues around accountability.  I know that is certainly the case in South Africa where labor laws have made it very difficult to manage people by their performance.  I suspect it’s a much broader, industry-wide problem.

Güera, thanks for these insights.  What’s your future look like when your academic work is complete?

Dan, I’ve enjoyed my independence in the past two years.  My academic work has been very satisfying, yet I’m now getting restless and realize I need to soon re-engage and get back to work in telecom.  Of course, whether I strike out again on my own or join a larger consulting firm, I’ll be selling a viewpoint on problems.  Is it possible to remain truly objective and independent while making money?  We’ll soon find out.

This article first appeared in Billing and OSS World.

Copyright 2011 Black Swan Telecom Journal

 
Guera Romo

Guera Romo

Güera Romo is an organizational designer with 22 years of experience in disciplines associated with business optimization and expansion in the banking, government and telecommunication industries.  She is also an academic researcher with interest in Revenue Assurance (RA) as practiced in telecom.  Contact her at guera.mr@gmail.com.

Black Swan Solution Guides & Papers

cSwans of a Feather

  • Is Your Company Penny-Smart and Dollar-Foolish in Auditor Productivity? — by Peter Yelle — Operators who fail to automate their invoice reconciliation process could be seriously undermining the morale and efficiency of their most valuable auditors.  This article explains the many subtle ways that manual auditing process can cost operators money.  Also presented is an analysis of the typical returns achieved by CSPs with mature cost assurance programs.
  • What If a Large Telecom Operated as a Thousand Business Units? — interview with Eric Priezkalns — The Haier Group, a $20 billion consumer appliance manufacturer is a one-company Capitalism Revolution.  It’s organized into thousands of business units with bottom-up as opposed to top-down decision making.  What would happen if Haier’s management style was used to transform a large carrier?  That questoin is the starting point for an intriguing “outside the box” analysis by one of RA’s biggest thinkers.
  • What Are the Proper Boundaries of Revenue Assurance Software and Organizations? — interview with Guera Romo — Is the mission of a revenue assurance department to be simply a watchdog over billing and operations functions?  This article challenges readers to examine the fundamental assumptions that underlie RA organizations.  Issues discussed include personal accountability, training, the scope of RA oversight, and the role of assurance software.
  • When Revenue Assurance and IT Clash, Look in the Mirror — interview with Rob Mattison — Succeeding in RA requires coordination with outside departments — billing, customer care, marketing, engineering, and especially IT.  This article shows how conflict often arises between RA and IT over what it truly means to “run systems”,  However, IT can be an even bigger roadblock when RA is confused about its proper mission.

Related Articles

  • Tokopedia, Indonesia’s E-Commerce King, Partners with 11 Million Merchants; Adopts Multi-Cloud to Drive Innovation — interview with Warren Aw & Ryan de Melo — Indonesia’s Tokopedia, founded in 2009, has grown to become one of world’s leading e-commerce players.  Read about its success, technology direction, and multi-cloud connectivity adoption.
  • Bridge Alliance: Knocking Down Regional & Mobile Connectivity Barriers so Connected Car Markets Get Rolling in Asia — interview with Kwee Kchwee — The CEO of an Asian consortium of mobile operators explains how they  help simplify and harmonize their members‘ operations in support of multi-national corporations.  This integration is enabling two huge industries to come together in Asia: auto manufacturing and telco.
  • Epsilon’s Infiny NaaS Platform Brings Global Connection, Agility & Fast Provision for IoT, Clouds & Enterprises in Southeast Asia, China & Beyond — interview with Warren Aw — Network as a Service, powered by Software Defined Networks, are a faster, more agile, and more partner-friendly way of making data global connections.  A leading NaaS provider explains the benefits for cloud apps, enterprise IT, and IoT.
  • PCCW Global: On Leveraging Global IoT Connectivity to Create Mission Critical Use Cases for Enterprises — interview with Craig Price — A leading wholesale executive explains the business challenges of the current global IoT scene as it spans many spheres: technical, political, marketing, and enterprise customer value creation.
  • Senet’s Cloud & Shared Gateways Drive LoRaWAN IoT Adoption for Enterprise Businesses, Smart Cities & Telecoms — interview with Bruce Chatterley — An IoT netowork pioneer explains how LoRaWAN tech fits in the larger IoT ecosystem.  He gives use case examples, describes deployment restraints/costs, and shows how partnering, gateway sharing, and flexible deployment options are stimulating growth.
  • ARM Data Center Software’s Cloud-Based Network Inventory Links Network, Operations, Billing, Sales & CRM to One Database — interview with Joe McDermott & Frank McDermott — A firm offering a cloud-based network inventory system explains the virtues of: a single underlying database, flexible conversions, task-checking workflow, new software business models, views that identify stranded assets, and connecting to Microsoft’s cloud platform.
  • Pure Play NFV: Lessons Learned from Masergy’s Virtual Deployment for a Global Enterprise — interview with Prayson Pate — NFV is just getting off the ground, but one cloud provider to enterprises making a stir in virtual technology waters is Masergy.  Here are lessons learned from Masergy’s recent global deployment using a NFV pure play software approach.
  • The Digital Enabler: A Charging, Self-Care & Marketing Platform at the Core of the Mobile Business — interview with Jennifer Kyriakakis — The digital enabler is a central platform that ties together charging, self-care, and marketing.  The article explains why leading operators consider digital enablers pivotal to their digital strategies.
  • Delivering Service Assurance Excellence at a Reduced Operating Cost — interview with Gregg Hara — The great diversity and complexity of today’s networks make service assurance a big challenge.  But advances in off-the-shelf software now permit the configuring and visualizing of services across multiple technologies on a modest operating budget.
  • Are Cloud-Based Call Centers the Next Hot Product for the SMB Market? — interview with Doron Dovrat — Quality customer service can improve a company’s corporate identity and drive business growth.  But many SMBs are priced out of acquiring modern call center technology.  This article explains the benefits of affordable and flexible cloud-based call centers.
  • Flexing the OSS & Network to Support the Digital Ecosystem — interview with Ken Dilbeck — The need for telecoms to support a broader digital ecosystem requires an enormous change to OSS infrastructures and the way networks are being managed.  This interview sheds light on these challenges.
  • Crossing the Rubicon: Is it Time for Tier Ones to Move to a Real-Time Analytics BSS? — interview with Andy Tiller — Will tier one operators continue to maintain their quilt works of legacy and adjunct platforms — or will they radically transform their BSS architecture into a new  system designed to address the new telecom era?  An advocate for radical transformation discusses: real-time analytics, billing for enterprises, partnering mashups, and on-going transformation work at Telenor.
  • Paradigm Shift in OSS Software: Network Topology Views via Enterprise-Search — interview with Benedict Enweani — Enterprise-search is a wildly successful technology on the web, yet its influence has not yet rippled to the IT main stream.  But now a large Middle Eastern operator has deployed a major service assurance application using enterprise-search.  The interview discusses this multi-dimensional topology solution and compares it to traditional network inventory.
  • The Multi-Vendor MPLS: Enabling Tier 2 and 3 Telecoms to Offer World-Class Networks to SMBs — interview with Prabhu Ramachandran — MPLS is a networking technology that has caught fire in the last decade.  Yet the complexity of MPLS has relegated to being mostly a large carrier solution.  Now a developer of a multi-vendor MPLS solutions explains why the next wave of MPLS adoption will come from tier 2/3 carriers supporting SMB customers.
  • Enabling Telecoms & Utilities to Adapt to the Winds of Business Change — interview with Kirill Rechter — Billing is in the midst of momentous change.  Its value is no longer just around delivering multi-play services or sophisticated rating.  In this article you’ll learn how a billing/CRM supplier has adapted to the times by offering deeper value around the larger business issues of its telecom and utility clients.
  • Driving Customer Care Results & Cost Savings from Big Data Facts — interview with Brian Jurutka — Mobile broadband and today’s dizzying array of app and network technology present a big challenge to customer care.  In fact, care agents have a hard time staying one step ahead of customers who call to report problems.  But network analytics comes to the rescue with advanced mobile handset troubleshooting and an ability to put greater intelligence at the fingertips of highly trained reps.
  • Hadoop and M2M Meet Device and Network Management Systems — interview with Eric Wegner — Telecom big-data in networks is more than customer experience managment: it’s also about M2M plus network and element management systems.  This interview discusses the explosion in machine-to-machine devices, the virtues and drawbacks of Hadoop, and the network impact of shrink-wrapped search.
  • The Data Center & Cloud Infrastructure Boom: Is Your Sales/Engineering Team Equipped to Win? — by Dan Baker — The build-out of enterprise clouds and data centers is a golden opportunity for systems integrators, carriers, and cloud providers.  But the firms who win this business will have sales and engineering teams who can drive an effective and streamlined requirements-to-design-to-order process.  This white paper points to a solution — a collaborative solution designs system — and explains 8 key capabilities of an ideal platform.
  • Big Data: Is it Ready for Prime Time in Customer Experience Management? — interview with Thomas Sutter — Customer experience management is one of the most challenging of OSS domains and some suppliers are touting “big data” solutions as the silver bullet for CEM upgrades and consolidation.  This interview challenges the readiness of big data soluions to tackle OSS issues and deliver the cost savings.  The article also provides advice on managing technology risks, software vendor partnering, and the strategies of different OSS suppliers.
  • Calculated Risk: The Race to Deliver the Next Generation of LTE Service Management — interview with Edoardo Rizzi — LTE and the emerging heterogeneous networks are likely to shake up the service management and customer experience management worlds.  Learn about the many new network management challenges LTE presents, and how a small OSS software firm aims to beat the big established players to market with a bold new technology and strategy.
  • Decom Dilemma: Why Tearing Down Networks is Often Harder than Deploying Them — interview with Dan Hays — For every new 4G LTE and IP-based infrastructure deployed, there typically a legacy network that’s been rendered obsolete and needs to be decommissioned.  This article takes you through the many complexities of network decom, such as facilities planning, site lease terminations, green-safe equipment disposal, and tax relief programs.
  • Migration Success or Migraine Headache: Why Upfront Planning is Key to Network Decom — interview with Ron Angner — Shutting down old networks and migrating customers to new ones is among the most challenging activities a network operators does today.  This article provides advice on the many network issues surrounding migration and decommissioning.  Topics discussed include inventory reconciliation, LEC/CLEC coordination, and protection of customers in the midst of projects that require great program management skills.
  • Navigating the Telecom Solutions Wilderness: Advice from Some Veteran Mountaineers — interview with Al Brisard — Telecom solutions vendors struggle mightily to position their solutions and figure out what to offer next in a market where there’s considerable product and service crossover.  In this article, a veteran order management specialist firm lays out its strategy for mixing deep-bench functional expertise with process consulting, analytics, and custom API development.
  • Will Telecoms Sink Under the Weight of their Bloated and Out-of-Control Product Stacks? — interview with Simon Muderack — Telecoms pay daily for their lack of product integration as they constantly reinvent product wheels, lose customer intelligence, and waste time/money.  This article makes the case of an enterprise product catalog.  Drawing on central catalog cases at a few Tier 1 operators, the article explains the benefits: reducing billing and provisioning costs, promoting product reuse, and smoothing operations.
  • Virtual Operator Life: Enabling Multi-Level Resellers Through an Active Product Catalog — interview with Rob Hill — The value of product distribution via virtual operators is immense.  They enable a carrier to sell to markets it cannot profitably serve directly.  Yet the need for greater reseller flexibility in the bundling and pricing of increasingly complex IP and cloud services is now a major channel barrier.  This article explains what’s behind an innovative product catalog solution that doubles as a service creation environment for resellers in multiple tiers.
  • Telecom Blocking & Tackling: Executing the Fundamentals of the Order-to-Bill Process — interview with Ron Angner — Just as football teams need to be good at the basics of blocking and tackling, telecoms need to excel at their own fundamental skillset: the order-to-cash process.  In this article, a leading consulting firm explains its methodology for taking operators on the path towards order-to-cash excellence.  Issues discussed include: provisioning intervals; standardization and simplicity; the transition from legacy to improved process; and the major role that industry metrics play.
  • Wireline Act IV, Scene II: Packaging Network & SaaS Services Together to Serve SMBs — by John Frame — As revenue from telephony services has steadily declined, fixed network operators have scrambled to support VoIP, enhanced IP services, and now cloud applications.  This shift has also brought challenges to the provisioning software vendors who support the operators.  In this interview, a leading supplier explains how it’s transforming from plain ol‘ OSS software provider to packager of on-net and SaaS solutions from an array of third party cloud providers.
  • Telecom Merger Juggling Act: How to Convert the Back Office and Keep Customers and Investors Happy at the Same Time — interview with Curtis Mills — Billing and OSS conversions as the result of a merger are a risky activity as evidenced by famous cases at Fairpoint and Hawaiian Telcom.  This article offers advice on how to head off problems by monitoring key operations checkpoints, asking the right questions, and leading with a proven conversion methodology.
  • Is Order Management a Provisioning System or Your Best Salesperson? — by John Konczal — Order management as a differentiator is a very new concept to many CSP people, but it’s become a very real sales booster in many industries.  Using electronics retailer BestBuy as an example, the article points to several innovations that can — and are — being applied by CSPs today.  The article concludes with 8 key questions an operator should ask to measure advanced order management progress.
  • NEC Takes the Telecom Cloud from PowerPoint to Live Customers — interview with Shinya Kukita — In the cloud computing world, it’s a long road from technology success to telecom busness opportunity.  But this story about how NEC and Telefonica are partnering to offer cloud services to small and medium enterprises shows the experience of early cloud adoption.  Issues discussed in the article include: customer types, cloud application varieties, geographic region acceptance, and selling challenges.
  • Billing As Enabler for the Next Killer Business Model — interview with Scott Swartz — Facebook, cloud services, and Google Ads are examples of innovative business models that demand unique or non-standard billing techniques.  The article shows how flexible, change-on-the-fly, and metadata-driven billing architectures are enabling CSPs to offer truly ground breaking services.
  • Real-Time Provisioning of SIM Cards: A Boon to GSM Operators — interview with Simo Isomaki — Software-controlled SIM card configuration is revolutionizing the activation of GSM phones.  The article explains how dynamic SIM management decouples the selection of numbers/services and delivers new opportunities to market during the customer acquisition and intial provisoining phase.
  • A Cynic Converted: IN/Prepaid Platforms Are Now Pretty Cool — interview with Grant Lenahan — Service delivery platforms born in the IN era are often painted as inflexible and expensive to maintain.  Learn how modern SDPs with protocol mediation, high availability, and flexible Service Creation Environments are delivering value for operators such as Brazil’s Oi.
  • Achieving Revenue Maximization in the Telecom Contact Center — interview with Robert Lamb — Optimizing the contact center offers one of the greatest returns on investment for a CSP.  The director of AT&T’s contact center services business explains how telecoms can strike an “artful balance” between contact center investment and cost savings.  The discussion draws from AT&T’s consulting with world class customers like Ford, Dell, Discover Financial, DISH Network, and General Motors.
  • Mobile Broadband: The Customer Service Assurance Challenge — interview with Michele Campriani — iPhone and Android traffic is surging but operators struggle with network congestion and dropping ARPUs.  The answer?  Direct  resources and service quality measures to ensure VIPs are indeed getting the quality they expect.  Using real-life examples that cut to the chase of technical complexities, this article explains the chief causes of service quality degradation and describes efficient ways to deal with the problem.
  • Telco-in-a-Box: Are Telecoms Back in the B/OSS Business? — interview with Jim Dunlap — Most telecoms have long since folded their merchant B/OSS software/services businesses.  But now Cycle30, a subsidiary of Alaskan operator GCI, is offering a order-to-cash managed service for other operators and utilities.  The article discusses the company’s unique business model and contrasts it with billing service bureau and licensed software approaches.
  • Bricks, Mortar & Well-Trained Reps Make a Comeback in Customer Management — interview with Scott Kohlman — Greater industry competition, service complexity, and employee turnover have raised the bar in the customer support.  Indeed, complex services are putting an emphasis on quality care interactions in the store, on the web, and through the call center.  In this article you’ll learn about innovations in CRM, multi-tabbed agent portals,  call center agent training, customer treatment philosophies, and the impact of  self-service.
  • 21st Century Order Management: The Cross-Channel Sales Conversation — by John Konczal — Selling a mobile service is generally not a one-and-done transaction.  It often involves several interactions — across the web, call center, store, and even kiosks.  This article explains the power of a “cross-channel hub” which sits above all sales channels, interacts with them all, and allows a CSP to keep the sales conversation moving forward seamlessly.
  • Building a B/OSS Business Through Common Sense Customer Service — by David West — Delivering customer service excellence doesn‘t require mastering some secret technique.  The premise of this article is that plain dealing with customers and employees is all that’s needed for a winning formula.  The argument is spelling out in a simple 4 step methodology along with some practical examples.