More bang for the buck

“The most valuable of all talents is never using two words when one will do” – Thomas Jefferson

If one could rephrase the above quote by replacing “words” with “systems”, we would arguably be touching upon the elusive dream of every Information technology manager to create a simple, yet efficient IT infrastructure. The irony, however, is that the pressures of responding to market needs, customer demands and competitor initiatives within unreasonable deadlines do not help in simplifying the architecture. Quick procurement decisions are taken and multiple disparate systems are stitched into the original fabric to tide over the challenges at hand. The arguments in favor of squeezing out every possible drop from every system are becoming more vociferous in the turbulent economic times that we are in.

Billing systems have been around in some form or the other for as long as there have been service providers, but we have always believed that the era of standalone billing systems is long gone.

Many communication service providers across the globe have to make a procurement decision every time they wish to rollout a new service or technology. This is either because their existing systems are incapable of handling the challenges of a growing business, or, because their customer management capabilities will be compromised if they do not change. Ambitious OSS/BSS product and solution vendors should work toward developing products that are future ready and address the operator’s OSS/BSS needs comprehensively. In addition, vendor’s need to go that extra mile to learn to co-exist by keeping in mind the end objective of optimizing the operator’s present and future investments.

Empower and grow
We understand that subscribers and revenues share a directly proportional relationship. That said, increasing subscriber numbers tend to ring alarm bells because they call for network, OSS/BSS and resource ramp-up.  What some operators have realized is that, while a certain amount of ramp-up is inevitable in the course of growth, a fair number can be done away with the intelligent use of their OSS/BSS platforms

One of the strategies for making operations easily scalable to acquire and service more customers is to implement an environment that empowers service providers’ own personnel, their channel partners’ personnel and the customers themselves to manage various aspects of their relationship. Picture an environment where the service provider’s own personnel have quick access to relevant information about their customers and they are in a position to make better-informed decisions. Picture  the channel partner being empowered to service the end-customer, thus reducing the load on the service provider’s resources. Picture the customer being able to self manage the relationship himself, to his/her satisfaction, anytime, anywhere.