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time asking people and testing formats. No matter how many consultants you have doing the analysis, you’re going to upset some group of customers. You just can’t have focus groups for everybody. You should never change bill formats when you go through conversions because it draws attention to something you don’t want people to be concerned about. You’re whacking the bee hive with a stick.
Finegold: So, as you said, it really comes down to strategy and governance. It seems like the complexity grows because of incremental fixes, which points to a lack of strategy. If a telecom provider lacks a strategic approach, it’s because things are managed and governed improperly. So when it comes to billing, which organization is responsible? Billing is a strange animal because it has one foot in IT and the other in the CFO’s organization. Is there a best place for billing to live, either under IT or under the CFO?
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“Every rate plan you have to convert is going to cost you money. The less there is to convert the less it costs.” |
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time. The more people in the pie, the more complicated it is. If you want to pull the whole thing together, it’s not a bad idea to stick it in IT.
That said, we always talked about moving it. If it made sense to move it back to finance, we’d do that. And we even talked about creating a separate billing organization. There are many different ways to split it, but you want to preserve revenue assurance no matter where it lives. So if billing is in IT, then you want revenue assurance in finance as a checkpoint. Think about it; the groups that work closest together are marketing, finance because of revenue assurance, IT, and the care folks who touch collections and
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LeFave: The question you have to ask is why would you put it in one place or another if it covers both sides of the fence? If you’re in a highly intensive systematic upgrade and you’re rebuilding the infrastructure, doing conversions, upgrading hardware, then being in IT probably makes sense. When it is a steady-state operating environment, then it’s not a bad idea to have the CFO run it. The bottom line is, there always needs to be someone in charge of billing, some kind of chief billing officer, who sees it not only as a means to recover money, but also as the number one place where you touch the customer. That’s often forgotten. Everyone gets a bill. If there’s dysfunctional activity, that can generate a lot of concern.
Coming back to your question, it really depends on how much effort and investment is going into the technology side. If there’s a lot, it makes sense to have it in IT where they’re used to running these programs. That’s assuming, of course, that IT is competent. In the two major conversions I’ve worked on, it made it a lot easier to have billing in the IT organization for that period of
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billing support. All of those pieces need to play well together.
Finegold: Just to wrap things up, I think our readers would value your perspective on what this economic mess will do to billing budgets and projects this year. What should we expect?
LeFave: I think there’s a lot of pressure on getting as much value out of your current infrastructure as you can. People just want to “make the donuts” for awhile. You have to be very cautious and prioritize your investments. Maybe changing that bill format isn’t something you can do right now. If you’ve got only so much to spend, you’re going to spend it on products, services, capabilities, capacity in the network. You’re going to squeeze every penny you can out of things that are running okay and hope in 2010 that you can move forward. But every time you turn on the TV it scares the $#!+ out of everyone and I think a whole generation of people are just beginning to realize how bad this economy really is.
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