Over the last two weeks I have been talking with a very charming lady responsible for pulling together the agenda of one of the biggest conferences dedicated to revenue assurance. To protect her, I will not tell her name or who she works for. During our conversations she admitted something that few people wish to admit, especially people who make money from arranging conferences. There are not many interesting new presentations or topics. As each year goes by, revenue assurance becomes more and more moribund in discussing the same old topics. And even the ingenious strategems used to make the same dull old sales pitches seem new and fresh are starting to get a familiar feel. Given that the world of revenue assurance is populated by young-ish people with some awareness of technology and often some awareness of the current hip trends on the internet, it is not surprising that one of the most common tactics to revive old presentations is the mash-up. You take one old presentation topic (say, Business Intelligence for revenue assurance) and mash it up with another (say, next generation services). Voila! New presentation! But not really :( Mostly the new presentation is just the same as the old presentations, but with half of one and half of the other. You may be thinking I am a cynical bugger and that people really are trying to say something new. I do not disagree on either score, but trying to say something new is not the same as saying something new. Is it really that likely that every RA manager in every telco who wants to talk at a conference really does have something new and different to share with an audience? Conferences still sell well, and revenue assurance still sells well as a reason to drag people to conferences. That means the demand for speakers with a telco job title that attracts paying pundits is greater than the supply of interesting new things to say. Take a look below at the topics that will be presented in the revenue assurance stream at TeleManagement World in Dallas next week. How many mash-ups can you spot? How many are just the same old topics that need to be mashed-up? And how many mash-ups can you make by merging bits of one title with another? I have managed a dozen so far. For example, “New Messaging Services in a Converging World”. The person who comes up with the most mash-ups from the titles below wins a year’s free subscription to my blog ;)
- Enhancing Revenue Assurance through a Centralized Approach to Managing Usage Errors
- New Messaging Services to Enhance Customer Value Today
- The Secrets of Maximizing Revenue in a Converging World
- Revenue Assurance for Next-Generation Services and Emerging Revenue Streams
- Managing Revenue Assurance more Effectively through Business Intelligence
- Delivering Complex Prepaid-Postpaid Billing Convergence to Create Customer Value
