By
Barbara Lancaster
A few weeks ago, the latest iteration of Billing & OSS World hit Chicago's McCormick Place. As this was the first event since the show and its parent publication were acquired by Virgo Publishing, we were eager to see how the new ownership would affect the overall substance of the show. What follows is a recap of the event from the perspective of LTC, International analyst and Pipeline Contributing Editor, Barbara Lancaster. She took in a great deal of the conference programming. Following her piece will be a few notes of Tim’s on the exhibition component of the event. Enjoy!
Business Drivers first; OSS/BSS second. Yes – Really! So say the presenters and panelists of Billing and OSS World 2008
By Barbara Lancaster
In a show dedicated to software applications, it was music to a die hard business analyst’s ears to hear pretty much every panelist and every speaker talk about the importance of getting the business strategies straight first and then building systems to support that vision.
From the opening plenary session of the new Billing & OSS World (the first under the banner of Virgo Publishing) getting the business drivers straight was the tone for the conference. Two service provider and three vendor representatives talked about what it takes to really transform service providers, successfully. We heard:
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Leonard Sheahan of Oracle say that it must be “Culture, process, organization, then the systems”.
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Phillipe Alvarez of RCN heartily agreed: “look at process first, then systems.” He acknowledged that it is very tempting to go for the systems first – it seems logical and touchable, but just don’t do it!
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Scott Jenkins of Sprint suggested that you find some low-hanging fruit to build momentum and use that success to work on changing the mindset of the organization.
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Tech Mahindra’s Dhananjay Pavgi observed that changes in the OSS/BSS environment are being driven by the changes in the network – and the services that the new network capabilities enable.
- IBM’s Bob Hoochi warned that “organization (change) is the most difficult” and suggested that common measures and metrics can be very helpful in getting disparate warring factions to work together.
Translating business priorities into actionable OSS/BSS programs and integration architectures is of course very, very difficult.
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With business, business, business, as the backdrop, the sessions did still manage to address tools, systems and implementation options. |
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In my opinion, it is because it requires two groups of experts to figure out how to communicate effectively. Business ‘speak’ and Systems ‘speak’ are truly two different languages based on two different perspectives and two very different sets of experience. The participants at Billing & OSS World 2008 were intent on finding bridges across this Grand Canyon. Fantastic!
Or maybe we can just buy something…
With business, business, business, as the backdrop, the sessions of course did still manage to address tools, systems and implementation options. Dan Baker of Dittberner Associates guided a discussion on Breaking the Billing Bottleneck, with three vendors discussing one of the current hot topics: whether or not a Product Catalog is the next magical solution. Amdocs, Netcracker and MetraTech weighed in on some of the issues involved in getting new products and services launched efficiently and the role of a Product Catalog in helping ease some of the problems.
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Ricky Boyle of Netcracker, pointed out that having a single repository of product information that could present different “faces” or subsets of information to meet the needs of each group was an important concept. Having recently made the move from service provider to vendor, he suggested that it was a fundamental change to be able to expose services to customers, and to content partners, and to the network, as well as the usual internal consumers of product details.
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