Long-time readers of Commsrisk will be astonished by a LinkedIn invitation that I received this week.
I have often expressed my contempt for ‘Papa’ Rob Mattison. The early popularity of Commsrisk was arguably propelled by my regular rubbishing of Mattison and the training business that he founded, the so-called Global Revenue Assurance Professionals Association (GRAPA). His intention to deceive was obvious from the outset. A real global association of telecoms professionals cannot be established overnight by a father, mother and son when two out of these three have never worked in telcos. No other global professional association has been founded by a lifetime President whose CV hinged on two years spent working in AT&T’s billing operations team during the 1980’s, then 20 years of miscellaneous consulting work on data warehouses before he reinvented himself as a ‘thought leader’ in telecoms revenue assurance. An authentic association of professionals would not have launched itself by immediately infringing the copyright of Hugh Roberts, the man who created the RA working group in the TM Forum three years earlier. Mattison claimed that his self-published book represented the telecoms industry’s first standard for revenue assurance despite obviously being aware of the work of peers from whom he stole.
Mattison desperately clings to the undeserved status that he attempted to give to himself, long after his limited knowledge of the telecoms industry has became redundant. Generating an income by selling RA courses worked for a while but evidently fell off as RA fossilized into an increasingly rigid and irrelevant series of reconciliations that he espoused more than any other. This decline in his core market forced him to repeat the same essential trick several more times, variously duping other neophytes who wanted to believe they would acquire a meaningful qualification in fraud management, internal audit, and several other fields where Mattison lacks the competence to determine what ‘best practice’ really is. He sought to sell this training to regulators too, which effectively meant he was seeking to influence their policies. Mattison got away with this because he exploited the cachet of being an American and former AT&T employee who was willing to share his knowledge with ambitious individuals in developing countries, despite him lacking any admirers in his homeland. Needing to repeat the trick to sustain revenues just made each iteration less plausible than the one before. More importantly, telecoms professionals in developing countries are less willing to indulge the stereotype that they are backward compared to Westerners. So now I assume Mattison is slithering on his belly in my direction because he is running out of alternative ways of promoting his business. He will not find any kindness from me. I would rather stamp on a snake than cuddle up with it.
Some people know me through work involving genuine global associations, such as the TM Forum, the i3Forum, and now the Mobile Ecosystem Forum. It takes time to pursue collaboration through associations like these; the experience will inevitably prompt some frustration. That is why these genuine associations will never receive any contribution from an egomaniac dictator like Mattison. He has to behave as if all knowledge flows from him alone. I would prefer not to spend my time denouncing penny-ante imposters like Mattison and the fake association he runs from his garage. However, I feel such enormous disgust at the harm that Mattison has done that I will devote a little more time to warning newer readers about his shenanigans. Here is a brief reminder of occasions when Mattison and GRAPA showed their true colors.
- Mattison listed the same fraud management qualification that he gives to other people as one of the qualifications he has received
- Mattison spammed Wikipedia to advertise GRAPA and his self-published books until he was thrown off the platform
- Mattison sells training in cybersecurity but he allowed one of the websites promoting his training business to be taken over by scammers
- Mattison and family members submitted glowing reviews to Amazon for his own books
- Mattison put on a raincoat and stood in front of a green screen for one of his promotional videos to appear as if he recorded it in London
There is nothing wrong with running a small niche training company that generates its income from entry-level workshops for fraud and RA analysts. It is very wrong to pretend to run an international association when it never organizes any working groups, never holds collaborative meetings for its participants, has no board or governance structure, and is dominated by a single individual whose only objective is to make money by exploiting the naivety of people in developing countries. Some problems can only be solved through collaboration. We need the whole world to be working together, making full use of the talents of experts from every region. However, the experience of dealing with Mattison has made me cynical about the overuse of ‘collaboration’ as a word. There will always be villains. Collaborating with villains leads to more villainy, not less. Villains will sometimes exaggerate their achievements or seek to dominate others through bribes and threats. Many of the responsibilities of a risk manager in the communications sector involve identifying imposters, seeking compromise with other players in the ecosystem, or countering monopolistic business models. But what really appalled me was that so many people who are supposed to be curious about facts and committed to the truth were willing to go along with Mattison’s deceit.
GRAPA’s foundation in 2007 depended on a brazen lie about what it was and who was running it, but some people in senior integrity roles went along with the lie in the hope that it might profit them too. That they signaled their willingness to reinforce such a petty and obvious deception taught the rest of us something profound about the more serious challenges that the communications industry faces. Even when the sham had fallen apart, and even though AT&T’s fraud experts should have a better understanding of Mattison’s status in this industry than anyone else, the US-led team at the CFCA was still openly boosting GRAPA on social media, presumably because some people spend more time playacting at collaboration than actually trying to accomplish anything tangible.
Integrity is not a slogan on a tee-shirt, to be put on and taken off as the wearer pleases. Integrity can only be attained if it is relentlessly pursued. That can mean getting your hands, clothes, and body dirty when you have to wade into the swamp. Nobody ever drained a swamp by standing on a hill and chattering some pretty words about collaboration. We need to dive deep to fix this industry. We need to make reputations matter again, which inevitably means encountering some dirt. Maintaining a memory and respect for reputation is crucial to tackling many problems, whether those reputations belong to our customers, to our businesses, or to our associations. We cannot succeed if the truth is always allowed to drown in a swamp of marketing. The snakes that breed in the swamp do not want their true natures to be made apparent. The onus is on the rest of us to bring the truth to the surface.
