Check out this interesting article from Billing & OSS World. All the quotes are from vendors, but the article neatly summarizes how revenue assurance is expanding/splintering/evolving/fracturing (delete according to taste) as it gets pulled in dozens of new directions.
Change is inevitable if RA is to keep in step with trends in the comms industry. As a consequence, the RA practitioner will find it more challenging to explain the expanded role they want/intend to/aspire to/must (delete according to taste) take within their business. With so many things that an RA practitioner could be doing for their firm, the synergies in terms of skills and knowledge are more difficult to achieve. A simple justification dominated the progressive roll-out of RA in the second half of the last decade – ‘we’d better do RA because everyone else is’. The ‘me too’ argument evaporates as we lose consensus about what RA does and should do, and as RA gets more tailored to the specific needs of each comms provider. Copying the RA approach of other comms providers is becoming less suitable because their business models are becoming much more varied. To paraphrase the Wizard of Oz, I have a feeling that RA is not in switch-to-bill territory any more. But if switch-to-bill is no longer the base camp of RA, then what is? Mark Nicholson, CTO of Subex and a former guest on the talkRA podcast, described RA’s new horizons:
“In a telco, which is an infrastructure-based business, it’s rare to find groups that have a wide view of a process. It’s rare. So [RA] people start to have intimate knowledge of the entire business process…”