Research found Revenue Assurance to be responsible for insanity

It is with utter frustration that I write this blog tonight. I feel like saddling up my transformation horse and change the archaic processes of academic institutions. It is perhaps not their fault.

I am reading the same RA material over and over in different forms. Some industry magazines have articles which portrait a reality closer to our experience within RA.  However, very few make reference to where they got such insight. Is this the author’s experience, his opinion or somebody else’s opinion he happens to capture aptly in an article? It is rather frustrating when you read something and realize you have read this exact sentence before.

Now consider this for context first. I am using over 40 sources for 1 chapter of literature review. For the essence of RA, I am working through more than 40 sources, which range from a 2-page industry magazine article to a 705-page book on Revenue Management. Trying to remember the context of each of these sources so that it can be consulted again in subsequent sections is daunting on its own. Trying to figure out which source is more authentic than the next is quite difficult.

What is driving me to consume large quantities of Easter eggs at midnight? The fact that the real goodies do not appear in literature suitable for academic research.  The gap between the reality on the floor and half the “how to’s” does not allow me to portrait the vision of RA for the future. In a sense it is almost a case of “whoopee, somebody integrated 12 years of literature to serve as “RA over the last decade for Dummies” because it certainly does not provide much of a basis to build on other than confirming that we are all over the damn show. But then again, those of us interested enough in the discipline know that.

The upside is that there are more than 40 sources to use, even more still if I really wanted to incorporate them all but that would not add any value. It is just sad that good material is available in blogs and speaking to people too busy in the trench to bother with approaching an academic journal to publish such knowledge. That is tacit knowledge that you can never give justice to in a 2-page opinion-flavoured article.

Perhaps we should hunt down the review committees of academic journals in the ITC or Telco fields and offer them some of my Easter eggs in exchange for making the process easier to publish real stuff.

Güera Romo
Güera Romo
Güera has many years of experience in business transformation in the engineering, defense, government, banking and telecommunication industries. She has experience in mergers & acquisition, rightsizing, re-deployment of personnel, business process re-engineering, system selection and implementation. Güera holds a BCom Hon (Industrial and Organizational Psychology) degree and is currently pursuing a doctorate that draws on her practical experience of developing human resource capabilities within large corporations.

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1 COMMENT

  1. Hi Guera, Hands-on RA professionals who are actually part of operations are running to cover the various challenges thrown at them. In such a scenario its a few people who have the luxury of time and want to make a quick name for themselves claiming they are RA professionals while they could only be part of a vendor operations. Which really is a pity.

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