The Yellow Brick Road

Choosing a Successful OSS Evolution Path

By Barbara Lancaster

This month's brick in the road: a pragmatic approach to ROI modeling

Managers in the telecom Service Provider business have a lot to worry about: driving down operations costs, improving customer service, launching new products quickly, using their networks efficiently to make the most of their network investment. To be successful (that is, profitable) Service Providers cannot afford to slip up in any of these areas.

At the heart of every Service Provider operation sit their Operational Support Systems. The OSS environment is of critical importance, because it provides the tools to define and deliver services monitor and maintain networks, bill customers and collect the payments. All of this needs significant investment. Unfortunately, it seems that in recent years most OSS investments have failed to deliver the business benefits that were identified in the business cases that funded them.

Over the years, we've analyzed many OSS projects in lots of different Service Provider environments to try to uncover what works and what doesn't. Every month in this column we will provide ideas and information to help in planning and executing OSS projects. We'll suggest ways of building OSS evolution programs that bring people, processes and systems along together, which is essential if the looked-for improvements are going to be achieved, and sustained. Sometimes we'll tackle generic issues, like this month's look at how to create an ROI model that really supports objectives. Throughout the series we will also explore the business processes, requirements, policies, performance measures and metrics of each one of the major business functional areas, using the TMF Operations Map as our discussion framework.

With those requirements in hand, we'll also take a close look at the vendors of OSS components in each functional area too. We'll share experiences with which ones work, and which are still works in progress.

We'll offer ideas and suggestions that have resulted in millions of dollars in savings for our clients and brought many projects in on time. And throughout, we'll welcome ideas, suggestions and requests, to create a column as helpful as we can possibly be.

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