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advertising. According the Pawlus, these appear to remain priorities in the tightening environment. “I haven’t seen a pull back in analytics and personalization yet. It’s a core component. If CSPs are going to realize a decrease in revenues, they want to combat that through better customer information and interaction.”

That point of view is hedged, however, by an emerging attitude that may prefer to pursue organizational change rather than throwing technology at challenges. That means “better training for CSRs, strengthening their brand, and messaging consistently through all of their channels,” Pawlus says. From a strategic perspective, improving customer-facing activities will remain a priority, but in lieu of some spending on analytics and CRM technology, we may see more of a focus in the short term on improving how key business processes are managed.

Looking Outside of IT and Telecom
Because there is an increased focus on mining the customer information that lives in billing and CRM systems, and on crunching it with other market data to produce more personalized customer segmentation, BSS suppliers are engaged more often with CSPs’ marketing teams than ever before. “Our programs frequently involve the marketing guys,” Pawlus says. The example he chooses to give, however, comes from outside of telecom.

“We sold to Dow Jones in the U.S. who bought Oracle billing and revenue management,” Pawlus says. “The IT folks were involved, but…we had several workshops where we got the business owners involved and they felt empowered, felt some ownership and didn’t feel they’d have things forced on them.” Further, Pawlus, says, collective workshops were effective because it helped the business owners understand what the new systems could do for them.

At first, he explains, thinking was limited by what existing systems and processes could accommodate. Once the people understood that the new systems would eliminate those limitations, they could think more freely about how they’d like things to run and what kinds of offers they’d like to roll out.

IT programs that succeed typically do so because they earn this sort of buy-in from across an organization. When IT operates

systems.” This expands the addressable market for BSS products outside of telecom – a fact that many business developers who routinely suffer the exhausting IT sales cycles in telecom should welcome.

Further, BSS suppliers should be excited about their increasing relevance to marketing and sales organizations. These groups have clout, are ideal champions for ambitious IT programs, and make it easier for IT groups to generate the cross-organizational buy-in they need to justify and follow through on multi-year transformational programs.

Hall walkers like Pawlus, and many other seasoned experts who live and breathe program management every day, say that it is as simple as getting groups of people who depend on each other, but rarely interact, into one room. Workshops where everything from grievances to new strategies can be shared are critical to driving successful programs. As simple as this sounds, this is a low cost and low risk way for CSPs to understand the impact of potential cut backs, identify the simple business improvements that can have the most upside, and prioritize near term investments in technology in ways that remain aligned with long term business goals. BSS suppliers have an opportunity to catalyze these exchanges and be part of the cost-cutting, revenue-generating strategies that come out of them.