By Brian Naughton
Today’s telecommunications service
providers (SPs) are reliant on IT systems
that no longer reflect the dynamism
of today’s telecoms market. To
survive and prosper, they need to standardize
the way that new customer-driven services
are introduced, processed and implemented
across their entire IT infrastructures.
Disparate Systems = Disparate
Operations
The biggest issue facing SPs today
is the cost-effective creation and
delivery of new products to customers
in a timely fashion.
Increasing demand for more personalized
and higher-value services, combined
with diversifying market competition
and a flurry of new technology-driven
opportunities, are stretching many
SPs’ IT systems to the limit.
Fundamental IT infrastructure issues
are being addressed with a series of
superficial quick-fixes, rather than
the required integration and standardization
of service creation and delivery processes.
Over time, this quick-fix approach
has resulted in different departments
within the same organization taking
an individualized approach to IT issues
that has compounded the underlying
problems. A product marketing professional,
for instance, has little idea how a
softswitch works, or the engineering
parameters necessary to delivery a
VoD product. Likewise, an IT engineer
has relatively little comprehension
of the business models integral to
the deployment of high-demand consumer-oriented
products. As a result, Business and
IT are essentially at odds and working
to their own agendas rather than those
of the customer or the business as
a whole.
Service Creation – one
by one
The net effect of this disconnect
is that unique relationships between
all of the departments involved must
be forged every time a new service
is created. This makes the creation
of that service an unnecessarily long
and complex process.
For most of today’s SPs, the
average time it takes from concept
to delivery of a new product or service
is around 18 months – this is
a far cry from the ‘on-demand’ generation
that today’s SPs are trying to
cater for. What’s more, these
relationships become bespoke to each
individual service and to clone or
even vary their functions they effectively
end up starting from scratch each time.
This incumbent inefficiency is the
reason that new services are so painful
to rollout as deliverable products
from the time of their initial conception
and design. Today’s SPs
Pipeline Publishing, Volume 3, Issue 12
