For this weeks question, I want to discuss one of the most annoying parts of working in RA – When data doesn’t link. A typical example is a network to billing reconciliation of the ADSL product. Typicallly a DSLAM will only contain information like dslam id, port, slot and maybe an IP address whereas the billing system will generally have some sort of service identifier along with associated billing information. The data as such is un-linkable and therefore would appear non-reconcilable – what would you do in this scenario?
RA Question of the Week: The Impossible Mission
Dave,
Having known you for long enough I know you know the answer to your own question…. More often than not there will be some kind of Bespoke order management system that will hold the linking data. The problem is more often than not that operators, or at least the individuals that are provided by the operators, don’t always fully understand their own architecture.
Regards
[Excellent answer above!]
Dave –
a) Data always links… it is merely a question on redefining your tolerances. (Although I grant you that towards the higher end of alpha values the results are not much use to anybody.)
b) Wouldn’t it be more annoying if all of the data linked all of the time? (Apart from not havng a job, vallium would soon be unnecessary…) On a (very slightly) more serious note – in consequence I have a new ‘question of the week’: should your problem above be considered an ‘RA Question?’
OK, so this is a scenario that RA people find at frequent intervals, but in my view this is not and should not be an RA problem at all, although it would be fitting and proper for an RA practitioner to point out to [?] that there might be an issue here. Adoption of the SID (assuming it ever gets finished) is supposed to cure these sorts of problem, but it won’t… because in a convergent multiplay world (where problems of this sort will abound) business decisions will necessarily overide technology-led solutions, which is what happens in almost all other mature verticals.
Hugh,
Thanks for the response – I think we’re in total agreement on the first point as for your question….I’m going to borrow(steal) it for this weeks post as I think it could raise some interesting debate