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”.