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Faster time to market, reduced cost of provisioning, operational flow-through—these are the goals that network service providers strive to achieve with integrated management systems. Meeting the high level of service demanded by today's customers hinges on how well a service provider's management and support systems function, but it also depends heavily on the effectiveness of the integration between back-office systems. Billing and operational support system (OSS) solutions are at the forefront of service providers' integration requirements because these systems directly impact a service provider's bottom line. An integrated billing and OSS substantially increases the service provider's ability to offer differentiated services and bundles, to recognize revenue from those services and to provide competitive customer service through a comprehensive view of service usage. The immense benefits to be realized through integration, however, can easily be offset by a solution that is poorly executed. The following discussion examines the integration process and offers benchmarks for assessing integrated billing and OSS solutions in order to minimize the investment risk. The product catalog The driving strategy for integrating billing and OSS is to ensure that each functional group within an organization has access to the information it requires. This information must be in an appropriate format and there should be a single point of entry for the data, as well as a common storage location. Product catalog integration clearly illustrates the complexities of achieving the above goals. The product catalog is a database of information and an associated interface that displays all information regarding the products sold by a service provider and maps these products to the services that a service provider can provision. As a result, some customer-led systems integration effort is required to offer correlated views of information for two distinct groups, engineering and sales/marketing. In other words, a sales and marketing group will need to see a "productized" view of services that includes packages of bundled services and their trade names and associated features and prices—information that is generally provided by the billing and customer care system. At the same time, an engineering or network operations group served by the OSS will require a view of those same services in terms of how they are provisioned: packages must be presented as individual services, and each service must correspond to its provisionable parts, such as a circuit's path and its termination points. These unique views must be offered with data from a single store, through a single interface, with the goal of ensuring "consistent data collection and availability throughout the various departments." Then, the integration must establish "links between key relationships to enable the success of a customer relationship management (CRM) program" (Egan 22). In an integrated solution, achieving this synchronicity is complicated by the fact that "each system element will have its own implementation data model for things such as customer profiles. The billing system may identify customers by their account number while . . . the provisioning system relies on circuit numbers" (Dancy 890). Richard Gustin, Director of Product Architecture at Daleen Technologies, Inc., warns that this challenge of offering correlated views "is so great that most integrations do not account for it in either system. Instead, they rely on a set of tables in the bridge software that map the catalog entries in the two systems to each other. This is a very risky approach, as all catalog changes must be entered at least three times: once in the billing system, once in the OSS and once in the mapping tables." Consequently, this process should be automated as much as possible to reduce risk. Testing new ground Partnerships between vendors of complementary systems are growing in number as the market for integrated systems grows. These partnerships involve ongoing cooperation, since integration is not an absolute concept, but rather a process that requires analysis of complex challenges. As Gustin asserts, effective partnership "should not be assumed based solely on the announcement of a partnership between vendors." Although the integration of network service management systems is a relatively new development, vendors should be expected to have resolved key integration struggles prior to tabling a solution for the service provider. Peter Gorecki, Chief Architect at Eftia OSS Solutions Inc., believes that both vendors are "jointly responsible for providing a product that is working for the customer. Partners should bring a tested, proven and working solution to the table," not merely an expressed desire to build such a solution.
In order to assess an integrated solution, a service provider must first determine what constitutes integration. With alternative solutions being marketed, this can be confusing. Middleware, for example, introduces a translation layer between two disparate systems acting as a single platform that identifies when a transaction has taken place and then translates it for each system. "This mediation platform . . . can support a multi-vendor environment where legacy and new off-the-shelf applications can be melded and compromised" (Martindale & Glanz 49). While middleware may play a role in the back office, it does not create an integrated solution. Integration must normalize the business rules between systems, not simply mediate transactions. Disparate systems must correlate the relationships between various data stores, process areas and the organizational groups that own them and incorporate them into what Gorecki calls "an enterprise view of the organization." Envisioning the enterprise An enterprise view of an organization is a big-picture view that recognizes management systems as tools that must serve to fulfill the goals of a business. It follows, then, that prior to embarking on systems integration, a service provider must begin with a plan for the way groups in its organization will interact with that data. "A healthy organization," Gorecki explains, "centers around methods and procedures that define how the systems—which are tools—work for the service provider." Next, a service provider must define how it wants these tools to work. In order to make such an assessment, the service provider must define the vision it has for building the enterprise that the systems running it must support. Before shopping for an integrated billing and OSS solution, service providers should establish the following:
Guided by these general themes, a service provider should begin with a case or scenario approach to plan the enterprise view of the systems and to evaluate integrated solutions. Gustin supports this approach: "The service provider should create a set of use cases that describe each activity performed by the largest set of users. Clearly define all actions performed by the main users (such as CSRs [customer service representatives], network operations personnel, perhaps the customer via the Web) and lay out which system will be used to support each function." Dancy's research supports this as well. She recommends that "to get the most out of this [vendor integration] approach, a service provider must rank the functions in order of importance to their operation and then identify the package that best meets their specific needs" (Dancy 890). Reducing the investment risk Once their goals are known, service providers can ask the following questions to evaluate specific solutions in order to ensure that common integration challenges have been adequately addressed:
Based on the challenges of integrating relatively new systems that are also undergoing constant evolution, there are red flags that a service provider can look for when selecting a pre-partnered billing and OSS solution. Probing the six criteria listed above will help service providers identify areas of concern if they arise. A few areas that should be of particular concern include
Learning to ask the right questions will help protect a service provider's investment by identifying truly integrated solutions as well as areas for expected improvement. A network service provider must have a clear view of its own business and goals for the systems that will run it and must diligently represent these goals to vendors. Ultimately, a service provider can expect to achieve substantial benefits from pre-partnered billing and OSS, including increased speed to market, minimized time to revenue and reduced cost of integration. "An integrated billing and OSS acts as a point of integration for the business itself," says Gorecki. "It helps consolidate different departments in an understanding of what a service order is and how it will be managed." With careful planning, integration can produce a smoothly running business in which all groups and functions are clearly modeled and well served by systems that together enable fulfillment, assurance and billing for innovative new services and bundles. From Current OSS, Summer 2000, Vol. 1, No. 4. Published by Eftia OSS Solutions. |
