By
Scott Bender and Norman
Rice
The telecommunications industry is going
through a fundamental market transformation
prompted by competitive pressures. In
response to this change, service providers
are seeking to offer an ever-widening
range of services to their customers
quickly and cost effectively. Voice,
video, and data are becoming the service
foundation with Internet Protocol (IP)
as the medium. To be competitive with
these services, providers must ensure
high service quality and customer centricity.
Add to the equation an average revenue
per user (ARPU) that is diminishing
and customers demonstrating their preference
for buying all of their communications
services from a single vendor –
the stakes have never been so high.
To address this new market paradigm,
carriers are transforming their networks
and integrating their customer facing
network with their back office IT infrastructure
to create new efficiencies. While convergence
can be thought of in the context of
product or service creation (e.g. the
triple play described above), service
providers must pay close attention to
the convergence required between the
Operational Support Systems (OSS) and
Business Support Systems (BSS) to support
the convergence of the service platform.
With the cost of subscriber acquisition
on the rise and the immediate need to
initiate service innovation to attract
and retain customers, what are the transformational
guidelines that must be observed to
support convergence?
In the process of identifying best practice
Next Generation OSS (NGOSS) tenets,
it is prudent to first understand what
areas of the business are impacted.
The need to deliver a plethora of services
to a broad set of devices in a rapid
fashion creates an external business
driver for historically separate organizations
to now collaborate in a near real-time
fashion (Enterprise IT, BSS, OSS, etc.).
This required collaboration results
in change that spans throughout the
organization.
Business systems are now required
to embrace an ever changing mix or
bundle of offerings within the service
catalog. The customer care organization
is now asked to support a more comprehensive
(converged) service offering. Those
in charge of product lifecycles are
now being required to incorporate
third party content and service ecosystem
partners in support of meaningful
collaboration that deliver unique
product offerings. Notwithstanding,
Operations is significantly impacted
as they are now required to support
an increasingly complex network (comprised
of both legacy and next generation
infrastructure, self service
portals, etc.) designed to deliver
a multitude of interdependent services
while being asked to monitor and measure
an individual’s “customer
experience”.
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Voice,
video, and data are becoming the
service foundation with Internet
Protocol (IP) as the medium. |
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![photo here](images/0307_art5.jpg)
So it is fair to say that the
adoption of a convergence strategy
is very disruptive to the business,
but who really expected it to
be easy with so much to gain for
those who are successful? Building
the next generation delivery platform
could act as an enabler in driving
the convergence throughout the
organization itself. The following
are suggested design tenets (many
of which may seem obvious but
bear repeating) for the Communication
Service Provider, or CSP, that
is embarking on the NGOSS development
mission:
- Investments should
be made with both scale and
performance in mind:
The CSP is building a delivery
platform not only for today,
but for the future. A new generation
of OSS solutions that can support
a customer base in the millions,
providing visibility into the
significant delivery infrastructure
and scores of third party integrations
are required to deliver the service
without jeopardizing performance.
These systems should be “highly
available” or “redundant,”
and support automation at every
level (tools/people/process) in
driving towards a service-centric
operations model that is conducive
to high quality attainment. Quality
awareness becomes increasingly
important given the customers’
“all or nothing approach”
stated earlier, raising the
stakes for the CSP.
As part of
this next generation OSS (NGOSS),
cost efficiencies would be an
expected outcome via the creation
of a common operating model,
but should not be the driving
force behind OSS adoption.
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