By Rick Mallon

As much as the communications industry loves its alphabet soup, sometimes the letters need to change. Communications Service Provider – or CSP – is giving way to Next-generation Operator – or NGO. While communications services are still a core part of what the industry delivers, the offerings, value chains, and ecosystems now cover significantly more ground. The industry has been talking about its shift toward application- and content- based offerings for years. Now it’s actually happening. Despite this shift in service models, however, many of the industry’s operational challenges persist, and these will make it difficult for CSPs to become effective NGOs. In a service environment where customers expect personalization and anywhere, anytime access to applications, disparate customer data, operational silos, isolated networks, and fragmented ordering and support processes simply aren’t good enough.

Becoming an NGO
One of the key characteristics that defines the NGO marketplace is competition. It comes from all quarters — telecom, cable, web-based and non-traditional companies. These competitors, along with the Internet’s conditioning users to expect free services, means more pressure driving down pricing and margins. Add to this the idea that in the NGO world “Long Tail” economics will dominate in the sense that a vast array of applications will be available for long periods of time that appeal to increasingly segmented groups of customers. In this environment, revenue is derived as much from aggregate sales across many products as from high-volume sales of a few core products.

This shift in revenue and consumption models exacerbates the relative lack of automation in service fulfillment operations. There are still too many manual operations tasks that result in relatively poor, end-to-end service order management and fulfillment. It also takes too long and far too much effort to define, design, and introduce new applications services that leverage the vast capabilities

certainly not in a way that enables all of the services in the long-tail product catalog to be profitable.

The Next-generation Operator can’t tolerate doing things the same old way. The NGO needs tools that allow it to define new services and create new bundles rapidly and simply. It needs to accept orders — or demands for applications — from any source, be it a CSR, a member services portal, a customer device, or a B2B partner. Visibility of service orders from end to end, which includes many interdependent sub-processes, is also a must-have requirement. These business and operational processes need to be manageable and configurable with standards-based, workflow-oriented tools, as well. Furthermore, those tools need to be equipped with pre-defined, proven service models and delivery processes to help the NGO go from IT implementation to service launch in a rapid timeframe. NGOs will struggle under the weights of cost and extreme complexity if their fulfillment operations can’t ultimately meet these fundamental requirements.