Tony Poulos has long been a passionate advocate for revenue assurance. He dropped me a line last week, to ask about the retirement of our legacy website, talkRA.com. Being the multimedia guru that Tony is, what began as a simple exchange of emails soon evolved into a podcast for DisruptiveViews!
Talking to Tony reminded me of the origins of talkRA. For talkRA, the clue was always in the title. The idea was to take scattered, separate conversations and to bring them together in one place. Those conversations may have taken place by email, over the telephone, on the stage of a conference, or at the back of the conference hall. That was the driving force behind talkRA, and it also meant we had the freedom to say a few things that needed saying publicly, but which were hard to say anywhere else.
By having the conversations in one place, we could also show the connections between topics. Now it seems obvious that implementing reviews in advance of the launch of new products is a valid and proactive way to realize revenue assurance goals. When talkRA began, it was not so obvious to some people. A conversation between people who have different strengths – data science, psychology, audit, and software engineering – helps us to see how different techniques can be deployed to realize complementary goals.
We are stronger if we combine forces, and collaborate. The change from talkRA to Commsrisk is a continuation of that theme, although Commsrisk reaches out further, addressing a wider range of connected challenges for the communications industry. Those challenges extend from the mining of Big Data for competitive advantage, to safeguarding shareholder value through robust corporate security, governance and ethics. However, they are all connected, and we benefit by recognizing how they are connected, whilst cooperating with peers who have adjacent skills and experience.
You can hear Tony and I chatting – and laughing – about the history of talkRA over at Disruptiveviews. We have both advocated for more investment in revenue assurance, and we discuss how the same assurance techniques are also relevant in other sectors. Tony is a kindred spirit, and I have always been grateful for his encouragement and support. Your encouragement and support matters too, and Commsrisk has seen a blossoming of contributions from a wider range of sources, allowing us to increase our output and publish a new article every weekday. We thank everyone who has shared their insights through Commsrisk, and we can always make room for more.
The more we share, the sooner we will overcome our common problems, delivering better service to customers and improved returns to shareholders. So long talkRA, we are moving on with Commsrisk.
