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walking away from
major chunks of their legacy OSS/BSS
environments. They recognize that
they cannot be dragged along any
longer without seriously affecting
the ability of the business to compete.
The End of Heroic
System Conversions
There is one more
piece essential to leaving the legacy
environments to rust gracefully away,
successfully adopt COTS packages
and achieve standards-driven integration,
and that is a way out from under
the immense burden of Migration and
Conversion. Historically, these activities
were tedious, expensive, and fraught
with risk and could even cause project
failure. In a panel discussion, BT,
at&t, Vodafone, KPN and Telstra
shared their experiences with the
nightmare associated with major system
replacement and described their approaches
to eliminating it.
BT’s Phil
Dance signaled the big change in
this area by stating that anyone
planning to do “extract, transform
and reload is nuts”. He sees
a Data Mediator strategy as the right
way forward, as does Telstra, and
at&t. Each talked about taking
advantage of the Data Mediator concept
to eliminate the need for large scale
data conversions, instead being able
to move customer, service, network,
and billing information on a transaction
by transaction basis, driven by business
rules. BT is working with Celona;
Telstra with Progress Software’s
award-winning Data Xtend product,
and at&t has built their own
Data Base of Record (DBOR).
Measure, Measure,
Measure
Another change of
note is the growth of the Benchmarking
initiative. It is now seen as a key
enabler for capabilities transformation.
Based on apples-to-apples analytics,
each CSP can identify where they
are most out of step, and confidently
put plans in place to make changes
where they can really expect to yield
the best bang for the buck. They
can measure how well they’ve
done, and re-set priorities as necessary
to keep closing the biggest and more
costly gaps. The cost of getting
all of the data together to underpin
the benchmarking work is still high,
and therefore somewhat of an obstacle
for many service providers. Here,
the key to establishing the base
of data required is to make the data
capture an additional benefit of
other high priority optimization
work – whether that is process
optimization, new service definition,
or architecture health checks, for
example.
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A Focus on the
Future
We commend TMF Chairman
Keith Willetts and President Martin
Creaner. They have taken a hard look
at what is necessary to keep the
Forum vital to its constituents,
and in doing so, decided that Media,
Entertainment and Cable companies
needed to be brought into the group.
Since many of the
old guard are still engaged in the
wishful thinking that they can control
the burgeoning business of content
over IP, this active courting of
the media and entertainment companies
is cause for some discomfort. In
one lively discussion between a major
service provider and the Walt Disney
representative about providing a
high quality customer entertainment
experience, it was apparent that
we must find ways to work together.
We can see at least
two reasons that service providers
should embrace the participation
of the Media moguls: one is to “keep
your enemies closer”, and the
second is to seize the opportunities
to learn from, and partner with,
these highly successful businesses.
As remarked by Telecom
Italia: doing the same things and
expecting different results is what
Einstein considered to be one definition
of insanity. To achieve the changes
in performance, persistence and profit
that the service providers are seeking,
major changes in thinking, approach
and solutions are required. We saw
some very encouraging signs in Nice.
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