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A GREEN LIGHT FOR THE AGILE ENTERPRISE By Paul Hollingsworth, Director of Product Marketing, Celona Technologies. www.celona.com Brief With data services and the web now established in most customers’ lives and with sophisticated content and software becoming available why is the delivery of great new services so slow? Telcos have spent tens or even hundreds of millions of dollars preparing their systems for the new world but are failing to establish the new revenues that will fill the gap when voice charges disappear. This article looks at some of the reasons and a solution. A downside to the common strategies of buying best-of-breed software packages or of developing custom solutions for different markets is that today’s product and service definitions are dispersed across tens of databases and hundreds of integration software programmes. This dispersing of product data leads to many problems, some of which are as follows. In order to create new products or even review existing ones, staff must view and update many systems, requiring a wide range of knowledge. Data consistency and accuracy, across systems, is hard to achieve because of multiple, duplicated manual updates. Even automated processes fail due to the complexity involved. Also, it’s extremely hard to reuse existing product data or business logic when creating a new product offer or bundling existing products. Resulting in product data being duplicated further. Product rules, such as product dependency or incompatibility, network limits or simple product code mappings between different data sets, are often captured in integration software and require skilled resources to fix and modify. New products require extensive testing and some rules are even held on paper or in the heads of CSRs to be used during manual processes, such as taking product orders or provisioning service. Unprofitable product offers remain in service because the cost of retiring them is high and because the resources required to remove them are few and highly skilled, and are involved in higher priority revenue generation activities. Due to the high cost of product launches, budget must be obtained for each change. Each cost analysis requires many different skills and therefore becomes a project in its own right. This in-turn adds time to market and can significantly reduce the effectiveness of a product launch. Ultimately, Telcos are unable to deliver a rapidly changing product set that will excite a new market and are slow at reacting to market change. Significant revenue opportunities are being missed and the cost of accessing the new revenues is too high. In order to solve these problems many Telcos have looked to replacing legacy systems with newer and more flexible ones. For example a new billing or order management system. Whilst these new systems help and reduce some of the delays they can take over a year to implement. They also don’t resolve the fundamental problem which ultimately slows product evolution: product, content and service definitions are dispersed in a multiplicity of data structures. The following text identifies three steps that are needed to begin the transformation into an agile environment. Step One: Create a single place from which to develop and manage products. There are two architectural variations for this: a centralised product database or a federated database. In a federated architecture, data is not mastered in a central data store but in a variable and dynamic set of applications. The problem with the centralised approach is that, whilst it may appear simpler, getting there is impossible. In order to implement a centralised master database it is necessary to prevent the update of any product data in the current applications. This in turn requires that all business processes updating products are modified and that all data is migrated to the central location. This is too complex and high risk to be achieved in all but the simplest Telco environment. Once this single view is in place Telcos can begin to change business processes in a gradual evolution and use the benefits of having one place to modify product data without being forced into using this for all data changes. If the user environment is effective then re-use of existing product definitions becomes possible. Step two: Create rules to prevent inconsistent data from being entered. If inconsistent data is input then the rules can be used to either report or correct the data automatically. These rules should also reduce the need to code business logic into the application integration layer. This diminishes the effort required to build new products and also creates an environment for rule re-use. If the rules can be captured in a simple user tool then the skill set required to define and build products can be reduced increasing the number of people available to manage products. By this point the Telco will have started to create and maintain products in much shorter timescales and with fewer staff, therefore creating immediate business benefit. Contrast this with a major migration project to implement a new billing engine or a centralised product catalogue. Step Three: Expose the product and service data via web services available from the unified view created in step one. This enables simple access and update to product, content or service data and their rules from any application. Now the process of product evolution is simpler and more efficient. At this stage the Telco will begin to recognise the power of agility. New products can be launched and retired with ease removing the budgeting, analysis, build, test cycle of the normal process. The Telco is able to compete efficiently and be a change and product leader An agile operation is not as far from reach as many Telcos believe. Simple, low cost steps can massively improve product agility. Seize the opportunity and turn your company into an agile Telco. Contact: Paul
Hollingsworth DISCLAIMER The views and opinions expressed in this article do not necessarily represent the views of MobileIN.com. You are encouraged to seek the advice of health professional concerning these matters of great importance.
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