I looked through the comments posted to the question about the Fraudulent Engineer and would like to quickly summarize the knowledge, skills and abilities (KSA’s) I picked up there.
- “…requiring some serious levels of expertise and a fair amount of coding”
- “…extracting all switch inventory tables and applying a lot of switch architecture knowledge”
- “…DMS filter compensation”
- Knowledge to know that there are switch level settings to suppress the generation of XDR’s and that there are legitimate business reasons for suppressing them (not all suppressions are fraudulent, so which is fraud and which not?)
- Switch settings at different levels such as line level, global level and group level and which rules override which?
- An understanding of trunks and gateways
- The ability to extract data and make it available in a form to run queries. This implies knowledge of SQL, SAS, advance Excel, etc
- Interconnect knowledge
- Service profile knowledge. This covers the difference between profile components on the network elements vs the profile components on the billing system. These 2 worlds don’t always use the same naming conventions, so that mapping must be understood as well as the fact that billing specific profile components may not be on the network and vice versa
- Root cause analysis
- Deductive and inductive reasoning abilities
Considering that RA mostly reports into Finance and the typical job profile for the RA analyst asks for reconciliation and recovery of leakage (correct the under or overbilling by correcting the reference data and resubmit the event for processing or raising a journal to correct the financial impact), at which point do we teach these analysts of switch level settings and are there courses available, aimed at the average non-technical RA analyst that covers this knowledge?
I have to confess, I learnt from this question. I did not know that it was possible to use the network without leaving a trace in the form of a call record (partial, incomplete or not) that I was there using it. I knew it was possible to delete those records early in the process and not send them through to mediation.
This raises an interesting point for the composition of the RA team and implies that RA is a decentralized function within the organization which requires contribution and support from all departments to resolve a query such as this. It is unlikely that the RA department, reporting to the CFO would employ this range of technical and telco knowledge.
I would like to hear from operators following these discussions who have people with this knowledge employed in their immediate teams and what motivation was given to management to allow such technical skills to be employed in Finance.
