Basics First …. Fanciful imaginations can follow later

In an era where the scope of revenue assurance is not clearly defined, we have a lot of opinion around what it should and what it should not contain. At times we see claims that go far beyond into futuristic needs and capabilities where things are showcased as ‘must needs’ for telecom revenue assurance. Guess what- I am still of the opinion, the first and foremost requirement is to fix the “basic issues”– and that is for both large and small operators and service providers.  All fanciful whims can follow later.  Here is a brief new article from the land of over a billion people- India. There are law suits going on between BSNL and other operators over interconnect charge disputes.

The fundamental issue is the need for a basic interconnect assurance system (which, I’m sure, happens to be in scope for conventional RA these days). If such a simple system was in place, up and running “properly” beyond sales presentations, for the operators involved it would have been far easy a challenge to solve.

But at times, in the wake of complicating things- we end up losing focus for the actual and most basic needs. The above article is an example portraying the same.

 

Moinak Banerjee
Moinak Banerjee
Moinak works at Protiviti Kuwait, as Product Lead for their Risk Technology Services. Over the years, he has worked in product management for several leading vendors of telecom OSS/BSS software.

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2 COMMENTS

  1. Moinak,

    As always, quite witty analysis in your post! I have also enjoyed reading your previous posts.I might venture to add that if the basics of operations were followed, RA practitioners may very well find themselves jobless – I sometimes think every telco should aim for this, job losses notwithstanding. I suspect we can always use RA staff in different capacity. But then again, such precision would be catastrophic as it might very well mean that nobody takes any risk and hence business, as we know it, dies! Well, unless we had a perfect risk management process?
    As for the flirtation with the “new advanced stuff”, I recall my childhood. Each toy that my parents bought was perfect. Until I saw the next one. Simplistic as it may sound, this form of toying around is afflicting us even in our adulthood. That is why if you meet up with 5 peers from 5 telcos, they will each be running a different RA toy. Only a few individuals pause to ask: beyond the toys, what is the value. What is the purpose? And how do we know that toy 1 is not the same as toy N? It is for this reason that up to now, such words as “upgrade”, “improved”, “revamped”, “re-energized” strike fear in my hear.

    Joseph

  2. Joseph Hi;
    Thanks for Your input. I would moderately disagree with You regarding losing jobs if perfect or even-near perfect systems are in place, because as You rightly said, it would help use the staff in different capacity. If You look into it, when Computers ‘first arrived’, some people thought it may be there to cut jobs heavily- but as a matter of fact, with the advent of the computer only more jobs were created.

    With respect to new technology usage, there is always a set of Innovators and Early Adopters as per the Moore curve of technology adoption lifecycle. But too many technologies die out before they gain acceptance in a larger space and market. May be AI based robots can be thought of as an example. The point I would like to drive is; for systems like RA, FM, CEM, CRM et al tools, no doubt advancements are quintessential, however, that should always come up on firmly built “basics”. Otherwise, there is always a possibility that the advancements add to increased problems and issues than providing benefits. This is the reason, I advocated ‘back to basics’.

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