about Business, Ideas, and Revenue & Risk Management et al..

D-Day-- ROC Revenue Assurance v5 Globally Launched

2012-02-13T12:25:00.001+05:30

No more teaser advertisements.... for today its D-Day.
My product ROC Revenue Assurance v5 is Globally Launched, and it definitely is significant for me.
One could say-- it is my first international product launch-- and well it is a grand scale of events for a grand product. Here is the link to the event: It is a Virtual Webcast.
It definitely is the one-stop shop for revenue assurance needs, and even then it is just the beginning.... for there is way more coming up.
Stay Put.

Subex to introduce ROC Revenue Assurance 5- a lot of 'first of its kind'

2012-02-04T12:42:00.000+05:30

I could not resist the temptation of blogging about my first large scale international product launch. Being the Associate Product Manager of ROC Revenue Assurance, it took us a great effort in bringing to the market the first of its kind Revenue Assurance tool. ... It is amazingly different.... and we made it happen.
Here is the first teaser ad. that team marketing got rolling into the web.

For anyone who reads my blogs, please feel free to join us [by registering at http://subex.com/roc-revenue-assurance-5-virtual-launch-13th-feb-2012-website-event.html] as we introduce a lot of 'first of its kind' capabilities for a market that is thought to be saturated and shrinking.

Tickling Human Emotions and Blaming it on Business by a Biased report

2012-01-28T21:58:00.001+05:30

I don't wish to sound like heartless ogre, but a report in The New York Times (find here) on the atrocities inflicted by Apple on its workers made me wonder about the purpose of such a biased report. Before I proceed, one quick question, does the reporter/(s) know about the conditions of the people [workers] who lived and worked to make Beijing Olympics a reality?

The first thing that the outlook lacks to the largest extent is the fact that Apple though the thing called 'Apps' has created one of the largest businesses and therefore one of the largest bread-earners for a ton of companies (and therefore human individuals) around the globe. The copy-cats like Samsung followed the same path as was shown by Apple, and that has in turn caused Samsung to grow by using Android. Although Apps were not invented by Apple, but they 'created' the economy.

Except for a single line about similar conditions in HP, Dell,Lenovo, Sony et al factories, this seems more of an Apple's-Back-Stabbing effort. It is not an un-imaginable situation to have cost of land, labor, capital extracted by selling 'product'. Product price points are set keeping these in mind. That is how any business house works. If China provides cheap labor, that is a driving factor for companies to open factories in these countries. Why look only at manufacturing industry, do You find any significant report on the work-life-balance (the so called must have) of IT creatures in India? Honestly, I could not understand the reason of this report targetted only for at Apple. It is because of the blasts and killed individuals? if yes, where are similar reports of such disasters in other billion dollar industries- not only electronics.

It no doubt is really grave to learn of the mis-fortunes of human individuals, but then-- a comprehensive and well made report is one that gives a full perspective and not a biased on like this!

I am not sure if such kind of 'Journalism' is what I am expecting from a paper as well known and circulated as New York Times. Talking of responsibilities, probably such biased reports are more detrimental to the society as a whole across the globe than the atrocities of Apple.

Power corrupts, Absolute Power Corrupts Absolutely - The Story of a Mighty Fall

2011-12-16T23:14:00.001+05:30

After a long break from blogging, I thought it may be a good idea to be back to blogging with a story of honest efforts that failed because of a maxim that the people overlooked. My dad used to say, 'power corrupts, absolutely power corrupts absolutely'. It took me a good number of years to understand practical implications of the maxim. Time for the story........... NOTE: this bears no resemblance to real life and is intended only for highlighting a few good-to-know-points of management. Any resemblance is merely co-incidental.
------
At the same time when the twin towers collapsed in New York, and with it that collapsed fate of millions, a few determined people started a venture that rocked the world right from the beginning. Over a very brief period of time, these people reached the pinnacle of success and became the obvious reason of sleepless nights for the CEOs of a number of big firms. They became known all around for the 'effectiveness' of their work- for they did good work. As they grew, it was time to scale up, and the flood gates opened to increase head count. First point of failure started with that. Soaring revenue, year on year growth, brought about the hubris born out of success, and the good men started enjoying the 'power' that slowly grew just as the team grew into a mighty organization. They say, with great powers come greater responsibilities. But some otherwise 'wise' brains had already been clouded by the stories of success, the glitz and the glamour. The net effect was an inherent disrespect of 'prophecies' of High Priests of business world (and their teachings in books like Crossing the Chasm, How the Mighty Fall et al) of everything that can go wrong. Effectively it turned out the prophecies had been made after years of research and analysis and were bound to be true, and they were more than prophecies- the were 'ideals' of what all not to do during the growth years of the organization. But the veil of success becomes the curse for destruction. Over a short period of less than a year, power struggles erupted with organized coups. If only the wise-ones understood that they were just fighting against themselves and not the outsiders who the wise-ones thought were their out right enemies. The outsiders hadn't build the organization so they left just as they had come. During the power struggle though, something even worse was created- monsters of Frankenstein. Some of these were mere mortals who were glamorized in spite of dire in competencies and out right professional nakedness. Under the garb of loyalty and goodies-for-good-work, lay the 'personal preferences' of the 'corporate order'. The other monsters were process related where the wise-ones seemed to have lost focus on what all drives 'business'- viz., Sales does, cash does. Even when the grounds had started shaking uncontrollably, the last resort was 'methods to fool others' instead of solving the emergency. As again the maxim goes: 'you can fool some people sometimes but you can't fool all the people all the time', the walls collapsed ultimately leading to a sore that the founders would have never thought of.
------
Enough of the story, now for the perspectives of what needed to have been done:
1. Hubris born out of success: This is a human tendency and hence it is all the more important to do self-evaluations. Win-Loss profiles, and self evaluation of both reasons of success and failure with a commitment of not to repeat whatever went wrong and yet institutionalize the 'novel' practices that worked wonders- these were the things to do. But with success comes the greed of power and retaining power.
2. Power dissipation: It is important to note that with growth one has to rise above ranks leaving the control to the lower levels. It is one thing to give attention to detail- which is quintessential; but it is completely different from power transfer to enable lower levels become self-sufficient. Both are essentially required. But the question is to whom You would transfer the power. The people!
3. The People- A-Class Teams work with A-Class people: When You choose to compromise on the quality of people You hire, You have opened flood gates for the not-so-required talents to flow in without filter. With B-Class people around, A-team members would only deliver B-Class results, and in turn the quality degrades over time, and it essentially did, else one would not have had to resort to 'fooling people'. One never needs to do that, if You know what drives the business.
4. Revenue is Vanity, Profit is Sanity, Cash is reality: This was told to me by my mentor (someone who is a Father figure to me- I lost my dad to cancer, but the Lord thought otherwise to bless me with his company). One should have looked into the cash book more often. the other most important factor is how much sales You have been making year on year? Take a 'wise' and un-biased look. Don't fool Yourselves- at least on this front.
5. Personal goals and preferences above the organization: There are companies that put organization first (ITC) and there are others that put Employees first (HCL), but not a single successful company has ever put personal growth of the senior executives as top priority coupled with 'their personal preference' of employees over employees' capabilities. It raises doubts of reasons of preference.

While I was reading 'How The Mighty Fall', I never thought the dramatization of a 'fall' could actually take place in reality in such a vivid way with the steps as:
1. Hubris born of success
2. Undisciplined pursuit of more
3. Denial of risk and peril
4. Grasping for salvation
5. Capitulation to irrelevance or death
At least in the last stage where the organization represents a hell-of-doom; there is still time for a retrospective look at what all had gone wrong so that in future that is not repeated. Essentially when leaders fail, the actually 'innocent' workers suffer much more than mere financial losses.

Your thoughts please.!

On a Kill Bill mission--Bharti Airtel and RCom

2011-09-14T11:03:00.000+05:30

That competition is a fierce war, is apparent in Bharti Airtel's attitude.

Here is an article, that depicts the fierceness of the operator in its wake of penetrating into larger markets.

Now if anyone thought it is just Bharti-Airtel, lol..... here comes RCom with even more plans to offer. RCom would offer three times the data for the price of one plan. Here is the corresponding article.

If such action continues, I'm sure shortly enough, we would have Hollywood flicks coming up showcasing the wars and battles.

Building a Business- from the seed, to sapling to a giant

2011-09-11T13:23:00.003+05:30

When it comes to business, often I have seen, it is only a few key things that needs to be done right, at the right time, in the right direction, and most importantly in the right way. Essentially there is no rocket science for success except for the fact that You know what You are doing and don't try fooling all around- which includes Your own employees, who happen to be the biggest strength of the organisation (yet often this is forgotten by companies, especially small ones), Your investors and VCs and most importantly the customers.

Here is a great article from TechCrunch (viz. The Job Of A CEO At A 200 Person Company) - simple in thoughts and processes to follow when for startUps and budding organizations. The article ends with a fansatic opinion, that a few start ups and small companies over look - "You are human. You make mistakes. You get stressed. But at all times, be real! Your people and your market want to hear from you—they want to know you and know what you stand for. They can sniff bullshit a mile away. Don’t disengage with reality behind the CEO’s magic curtain—it’s all too easy. Keep it real.".

As a matter of fact, as seen even in this article, there is no rocket science of success and exactly similar thoughts are laid out by Guy Kawasaki in his book, "The Macintosh Way" which simply put reads as 'Doing the Right Thing' and 'Doing Things Right'.

One can interpret it simply as "be honest in transactions" and don't bullshit, for that won't help You in the long run.

'INRA'- could this be tomorrow's definition for today's RA?

2011-08-20T22:58:00.002+05:30

How about an acronym ‘INRA’ which reads as ‘Investment aNd ROI Assurance’?
Don’t worry, it is not a new mouthful marketing term that has just jumped out in some bright brain, but the concept and where it stems from is fairly simple. Let me try and explain.

Two questions: Who is RA for? and What is the scope of RA? The age old question that probably is yet to be answered is ‘what is the scope of revenue assurance?’ and we have opinions all around the globe w.r.t its scope, which typically and unfortunately resonates the safe home ground that the specific claimant is confident of. If protecting the revenues of the company is a target, then should revenue assurance not be a part of ‘every’ company on the face of Earth? Obviously the metrics and KPIs would be different, but how come RA is then spoken of as the terminal illness primarily of telecoms? Is it because of the loss volumes are deemed extremely high- could be? But then, by large all types of companies would need some system or the other for RA activities? I don’t seem to see a lot of claims around that- pardon my ignorance if that also is a big buzz word that I am not aware of.

So if one has to come up with a fairly benign definition of RA, should it not include safeguarding the investments and therefore determining ROIs of investments made by the companies? ‘End of day’, you try and “assure” “revenue”. I get it when one would say, revenue is all that for which You can raise an invoice, but hey, someone else also raised an invoice that You paid for in getting a bunch of systems that is supposed to do some work and get Your ROI in x-amount of time. Why would that not be considered a part of ‘assuring’ revenues?

Some terms like ‘cost assurance’, ‘margin assurance’ and the likes seem to speak in volumes of the work that is there for safe guarding revenues. So, if at the end of everything one is targeting to save revenues and mind it, at all quarters and corners of the business, should “everything” not be a part of something like ‘INRA’? And INRA is for ‘everyone’….nothing specific to telecoms only.

One more point; lets keep this straight and simple, first safeguard and stabilize your ‘today’ which is the present state, before trying to optimize for a better future. No point thinking of a glorious ‘future’ if You are dying today, and therefore optimization is definitely out of scope of INRA.

War of Worlds- The Tariff War in telecom continues- Time to Assure Business

2011-05-31T10:52:00.000+05:30

Don't think of the Tom Cruise starrer Hollywood flick, for this post is about the recent news of MTS slashing base calling tariff to half paisa per second, that is roughly $(1/9000) per second. Read the full article here.

Imagine the state of affairs w.r.t competition that a company (which like all other operators in the Indian sub-continent) is trying to make a living by cutting down the cost of calls in spite of itself (like all others) having to face still operational cost issues-- which effectively are all on the rise.

MTS is a relatively new incumbent in the market that is dominated by the likes of Bharti Airtel, Vodafone, Idea Cellular, Reliance and Tata.

As the war for call tariff reduction as a tactic to increase the customer base continue, the operators (all of them) seem to be bleeding profusely trying to contain the costs while barely managing to make money in business.

Something tickles within me, when I see this happening and thus it seems to me that the obvious choice of survival for the telecom in this economic belt would be nothing less than 'consolidation'. The tariff war is taking a toll on the business economics of the telecom world and I don't see a lot of survivors in the near future.

The quintessential need of the hour before the wave of consolidation (which I so anticipate happening) sticks in and even after that would thus be 'business assurance'-- a term being now used frequently in the telecom C-level rooms. Still a flux in terms of the scope and definition, business assurance may be the answer to the methods that telecom world would use in order to :
1) contain costs across the board, while trying to increase
2) cash reserves,
3) cash flows,
4) EBIDTA
5) net-profit,
6) revenue and obviously bookings
...possibly in the above order of priority.

I guess, its just about time we see a wave of economics tsunami hitting the telecom world.

An excellent read on Business Assurance from TMNG and GTB

2011-05-19T14:27:00.000+05:30

The following article was published in http://www.globaltelecomsbusiness.com.
Since there was no link to share in blogger, I am copy pasting the content of the article in here.
Please read the original article here.

"

A holistic approach to optimising business performance

21 April 2011

As operators continue to transform their businesses, c-level executives are increasingly turning to business assurance as a means to gain a holistic view of their businesses’ performance. Co-sponsored feature: TMNG Global

Howard Watson: Business assurance is now at the top of the
agenda of the COO and increasingly on the agenda of CEO


The term ‘business assurance’ is still relatively new in the telecoms operator sector and to an extent suffers from the hype cycle that often afflicts the emergence of new terminology. It’s important to understand that this is not a new name for revenue assurance or service assurance but a mature concept designed to describe the effort to gain greater insight into actual business performance across an operator’s environment “This is an assurance activity that sits at an executive level within the organisation,” says Howard Watson, managing director of Cartesian, a TMNG Global company. “While as a company we have a rich heritage in revenue assurance, process re-engineering and customer satisfaction, business assurance extends into the areas of cashflow, cost containment and into the financial operations of the business. Business assurance is now at the top of the agenda of the COO and increasingly on the agenda of the CEO.”
That advance into the boardroom underscores the importance of a disciplined approach to business assurance to the modern operator. However, adopting the business assurance mindset effectively requires operators to also transform their processes and operations from both organisational and cultural perspectives. “If you consider some of the business improvement methodologies that have been used, like Six Sigma, adoption requires a culture where everyone buys into the technology being used,” explains Watson. “In our experience, business assurance needs a similar level of corporate-wide commitment. We have found that this approach must be sponsored by the highest levels of executive management and embraced by the entire enterprise. Every new service introduction, technology change, process improvement and system development effort should be viewed through the prism of business assurance. Once business assurance is embraced by the enterprise it will facilitate that all of your key performance metrics are optimized – not the least of which is ensuring the highest level of service for your customers. For example, our QSA tool ensures when you finish migration and transformation, you leave behind a culture that solves the root cause of a problem.”
Watson certainly knows about the challenges operators face in ensuring lasting success in transformation and migration. Prior to joining TMNG he spent 16 years working in the UK cable industry, which became Virgin Media. Watson led the cable operator’s technology initiatives as its chief of Transformation and Technology. Under his leadership, the technology division of Virgin Media saw revolutionary change as Watson introduced new key and strategic positions, including CTIO and executive director of change, and implemented new strategies to earn the banner “most cost efficient division”. In addition, as the chief technology and information officer of Telewest, which later merged with rival provider NTL to form Virgin Media, Watson was instrumental in the establishment of Telewest as one of the best performing cable operators according to industry analysts.
“I spent 16 years in the UK cable industry and that was characterised by continuous acquisition and merger activity which meant a lot of transformational activity took place all the time,” says Watson. “What I learned, sometimes through bitter experience and sometimes more easily, is that successful transformation is about engaging the entire operation. Business assurance does pull all that together, bringing financial, technical and customer experience organisations together with a shared goal. At Virgin Media, the transformation was sticky, so it continues, that’s because everyone was engaged.”
“People want a partner who can help facilitate the various parts of the organization to pull together,” he adds. “These challenges cannot be addressed in a vacuum or from one vendor’s point of view. A best-in-class business assurance program must be holistic, addressing revenue, costs, margin, cash flow, service, customer satisfaction and operational efficiency, include all the vendors in the value chain, be highly automated, and include experts who fully understand the transformation that is taking place in the communications, media and technology industries.
Much of TMNG’s proposition appears to resemble the management practice applied to other industry verticals but Watson acknowledges that telecoms operators face an array of challenges that are unique to their industry in addition to other challenges faced by other verticals. “Obviously, each vertical has its own challenges,” he says. “The important characteristics of a telecoms operator are that essentially they have a lot of customers that are paying an annuity revenue stream. As an operator your revenue is about lifetime value of your customers which you try to increase. The utility and financial services sectors are similar in that respect.”
Given that, are telecoms operators as savvy as those similar sectors when it comes to business assurance? Watson says the message is getting through. “We need to continue to stimulate the market and ensure business assurance continues to stay in the front of operators’ minds,” he says. “The sector is very customer-centric so for that reason it becomes a top table consideration and is on the c-level agenda.”
TMNG Global has assembled both the technical expertise and the experience to aid operators throughout their transformations. “One of our core areas of expertise is in working with customer to transform their business,” says Watson. “That really applies across the entire lifecycle to what processes are required and what is the impact of specific changes. We can work with the operator to prioritise where transformation is required.”
TMNG Global’s Business Assurance assessments and solutions combine its expert business assurance consulting services with its award-winning business assurance software suite, Ascertain, their internationally-recognised, proprietary Quality Business Controls (QBC), eLexicon, and Quality Systems Audit (QSA) methodologies. For example, TMNG’s eLexicon is a web-enabled toolset and accompanying methodologies that contains user requirements gathered from numerous projects with more than 250 operators, both domestic and international. “We have methodologies for transformation and how to undertake transformation in a repeatable way,” says Watson. “We also provide our Ascertain Business Assurance Suite, which we deliver and leave in place, essentially providing the business with a business assurance dashboard and heartbeat.”
This type of integrated and comprehensive approach is increasingly required across the c-level suites at operators. “Business assurance is at the CEO, CIO, CFO, COO level,” confirms Watson. “Those functions all have this need in common and the underlying driver is the complexity that continues to increase within a telecoms operator, within its IT operations and, more and more, in the sales channels. Process and systems complexity increases quite dramatically at times and our operator customers are focusing increasingly on outsourcing and using third parties which means a framework is also required to simplify and manage those relationships.”
The business assurance market is certainly geared to address that complexity. “What was revenue assurance and resided in the CFO domain involved taking that information and focusing on the lost revenue,” adds Watson. “Now instead of focusing on loss, assurance might be about gaining insight into the 99.99% of revenue that has been assured. Operators might want to know how their high value customers have performed from a revenue point of view and that becomes relevant as a CEO dashboard – whether a CEO looks daily or weekly is an ongoing issue.”
The Ascertain Business Assurance Suite, mentioned earlier, is TMNG Global’s centralised business assurance portal that monitors, reports and analyses the many revenue streams and costs within a company. With a common interface that effortlessly collects and reconciles data while providing constant monitoring of activities and trends, Ascertain ensures users can focus on the results ensuring revenue is recovered, operating costs are reduced and permanent corrective actions are taken. “The key is to have that holistic approach and work from start to finish on a programme of corrective actions,” explains Watson. “Delivering the Ascertain platform enables operators to define symptoms and ensure issues have been corrected. The ultimate objective is to ensure that customer satisfaction has been increased.”
Watson says that while the holistic approach of business assurance delivers a wider set of benefits, there is still value in operators targeting specific aspects of their businesses. “You can and we still do target specific requirements with revenue assurance, for example,” he says. “Operators are looking at reducing the number of suppliers they have and the CIO wants to have integrated solutions so the holistic approach is becoming more the norm. Even with a single supplier, there tends to be a componentised architecture. We can provide a fully integrated architecture and that helps you find the cracks in the underlying architecture.”
For Watson, both schools of thought exist. The first thought is that a pre-integrated solution will have a lower total cost of ownership for the IT infrastructure, while the second thought centres on specifying best of breed solutions with integration done in-house. “There are pros and cons to both approaches,” says Watson. “From a business assurance perspective, we are ensuring we can work with both.”
The TMNG Global approach fits either preference and that, coupled with the market experience the company brings to its engagements, is the key differentiator. “We’re not just a mainstream enterprise software provider,” points out Watson. “Many of our staff have previously worked within operators and been involved in real engagements with real operators delivering added value. We know what it is like to get our hands dirty and we can bring that to bear in our engagements.” GTB

Using Social Media for CRM or CEM

2011-04-27T10:00:00.001+05:30

Here is a good article I caught up with on CRM / CEM. (This was published as an article in Yahoo)

On Cloud 2: making fans of customers on social media

By Siddharth Cavale

BANGALORE (Reuters) - In May 2008, a blog post caught computer maker Dell Inc by surprise: popular tech blog Gizmodo had broken news about Dell's Inspiron 910 mini-notebook -- months ahead of its launch -- after seeing CEO Michael Dell toting the notebook at an industry conference.

Instead of staying mum, Dell saw an opportunity in the frenzied online buzz to track what was being said about the notebook and gauge the level of potential users' expectations.

And it paid off.

Dell realized potential customers were planning to pass up a competitor's projects for the new Dell Mini 9; the social media chatter was extending the buying cycle and driving demand. (http://www.slideshare.net/Radian6/dell-social-media-case-study)

A combination of social media and traditional customer relations management -- social CRM -- is allowing companies like Dell to track customer conversations, react swiftly to issues they raise, gain insight into their needs and interact with them.

"The (social CRM) market is over $1 billion in social business solutions this year and is growing at 30-40 percent," said Michael Fauscette, analyst at research house IDC.

Companies that provide customer relationship management services on the Internet, or 'cloud' services, are alive to the opportunity and are snapping up firms that offer social media monitoring services.

This marriage of social media, such as Facebook , Twitter, and blogs, with the 'cloud' -- a term that refers to the shift to providing software, computing power and data storage on the Internet -- has been dubbed Cloud 2.0.

Last month, Salesforce.com bought Canada-based Radian6, which counts Dell, Kodak and PepsiCo among its customers, for $326 million. Smaller rival RightNow Technologies bought HiveLive in late 2009, and SuccessFactors last year bought out CubeTree.

CRM vendors' spending on social software to support sales, marketing and customer service processes will top $1 billion worldwide within two years, IT research firm Gartner estimates.

That figure compares to a forecast of more than $12 billion for overall spending on CRM software in 2012, meaning social CRM will account for around 8 percent of total CRM spending next year, double this year's level, Gartner said.

Given how so-called cloud stocks have performed, investors appear receptive to companies making these acquisitions to accelerate growth in new areas like social media. Shares of Salesforce rose 6 percent after its Radian6 news, and Successfactors gained 8 percent after buying CubeTree.

Industry analysts say cloud computing projects tend to generate quick returns, allowing companies to quickly recoup what they spend on the projects and see tangible benefits to their businesses.

INTEREST IS THERE

"I bet a lot of Salesforce's peers are looking at this as well ... it looks like a lot of them are slow or are confused about social CRM, which they say is still in its infancy," said Lyle Fong, CEO of Lithium Technologies, which provides similar social media monitoring solutions to Radian6, and is cited by analysts as a potential acquisition target.

Lithium, which used to provide Internet traffic monitoring, bought Scout Labs last year and transformed itself into a social media monitoring service.

IDC's Fauscette sees Oracle and Salesforce -- which was founded by CEO Marc Benioff in 1999, when he left Oracle -- as potential buyers for Lithium Technologies.

"I'm not sure Salesforce's acquisition of Radian6 indicates a broader trend of consolidation in the industry," said Subha Rama, senior analyst with ABI Research. "However, it does demonstrate that companies are looking to understand the return on investment from their social media initiatives."

As this capability is better delivered from the cloud, you might see software-as-a-service (SaaS) providers buying smaller analytics firms to fill a skills gap, Rama said.

"I don't think IBM will do a buy ... they already have an in-house solution, but Oracle is definitely going to look to acquire some products in this space," she said.

Lithium Tech's Fong reckons all the social media monitoring companies will be bought out in the next year.

"All the big ones are already gone ... that space will disappear as a stand-alone space very shortly," he said.

(Reporting by Siddharth Cavale in Bangalore; Editing by Unnikrishnan Nair and Ian Geoghegan)

-- This article was published in Yahoo.

The following is the link for the same:

http://in.finance.yahoo.com/news/On-Cloud-2-making-fans-reuters-2825969472.html

Telecom Asia Awards 2011 Presentation

2011-04-26T10:18:00.000+05:30

Telecom Asia Awards 2011 Presentation

....

but it is surprising to see no Indian operators on the top!

(This is a direct link to 'Poulos Ponderings' at http://tonypoulos.com/videos/ )

Oracle CRM: Delivering a 'Wow' Customer Experience

2011-04-20T10:22:00.000+05:30

"Optimizing" Revenue Assurance

2011-04-13T11:50:00.000+05:30

For a number of years now, there has been fair bit of 'buzzzzzzzz' on Proactive Revenue Assurance.
Let me try and put a few things straight first:
- (Reactive) Assurance: Assuring after the fact and preventing recurrence in future
- Active Assurance: Assuring 'as and when' things are falling apart, fixing and hoping to stop things from falling apart in future.
- Proactive Assurance: Playing 'Minority Report' (the Tom Cruise starer movie). Just joking. The concept I hope is to 'assure' before things fall apart.

Using the word 'Assuring' so as to avoid having to define the "scope of revenue assurance" et al.

Nice thoughts and for all practical purposes all are flawed-- whatsoever the Gurus of Marketing of pro-typical software vendors may say. Ask the real guy who works his ass off in assuring revenue and You would get the real picture of the actual facts of what works and what not.

Essentially what is typically necessary is means to 'automate' reporting and controls that are put in place. Imagine having to use a 100 person strong team for regular reporting and control purposes. The effective tool is one that helps to free up the human resources by automating the manual activities, so that the same set of people can be effectively used for finding and 'assuring' other areas of the business, else the capacity is under-utilized.

Note however, a effective output (efficiency) of any process in any place/industry/region is guided by the throughput of the slowest working unit of the process. If you increase capacity in one or more working unit only without considering how to improve the overall efficiency, all that is done is maximizing 'inventory' thus building up operational costs with no output. End of day You hurt Your own business. So howsoever You try and fix everything about reporting and controls, if the bottleneck is in getting the data itself in the first place, all other processes is guided by how well You get the data and process the same.

Success of a effective processes around revenue management and business assurance (say call it 'Optimized Revenue Assurance') therefore is guided by the capability to optimize the throughput of the slowest process. The key steps therefore are:
1) to identify the slowest process
2) identify how to optimize the same
3) ensure the rest of the processes are aligned to the output capability if the slowest one.
Note, it is not necessary to have the rest of the processes running at full capacity over and above the capacity of the 'sub-optimal' process-- for that would just increase the operational costs for the organization.

This is a very engrossing topic.... hope to write more on the same in future posts.
All Comments of All Forms are Welcome.

Fumbled Tablet Strategy Cost Acer CEO His Job

2011-04-04T16:41:00.002+05:30

Fumbled Tablet Strategy Cost Acer CEO His Job, Sources Say

CEO Gianfranco Lanci’s departure from Aceryesterday was both sudden and unexpected. What precipitated it? The company line says it was his differences with Acer’s board of directors. But over what, specifically? Evidently, Lanci grievously misjudged the impact that tabletswould have on the company’s core business.

Sources at Acer told DigiTimes that Apple’s iPad undercut the company badly in the netbook market. And it quickly became clear that simply boosting shipments of notebooks to win market share was no longer a viable strategy. “We were almost too successful in the past…but more recently the iPad and other new form factors have had a very big impact on the PC market,” Acer Chairman J.T. Wang told the Financial Times. “We have to change our business strategy.”

And leadership. Because Acer needs to replicate in tablets its success in notebooks. To do that, it must approach the market as Apple or HTC might, searching out profits on high margin devices. And according to Acer execs, Lanci was too busy fighting a pricing war with Dell and Hewlett-Packard to realize it. Said Acer CFO Tu Che-min, “There is good consensus among the board members that the tablet is the way to go.”

Time to chase profits over market share.

SOURCE: http://digitaldaily.allthingsd.com/20110401/fumbled-tablet-strategy-cost-acer-ceo-his-job-sources-say/

Mobile Banking-- could this be a possible pain-reliever for telcos in India ?

2011-03-29T11:41:00.001+05:30

In a recent article MasterCard''s India-born President and CEO Ajay Banga said, India presents much more exciting opportunity than China in terms of growth of the credit card business. Read the complete article here.

He argues .."that cash is expensive for an economy to print, distribute and secure, costing between 0.6 to 1.5 per cent of the country''s GDP". However, another reader (Satheesh S) has put up a valuable where he says "Nearly 80% people in the village didn't know how to use debit card,Because lack of awareness and they are illiterate, so we need to convert the all the people in our country in to literate.Then only we Exciting in these matter".

What is significant to note here is that there is an opportunity for the telecom operators in India. With the ever dwindling ARPUs, increasing cost of operations, lack of bandwidth for matured operators and lack of subscribers for new incumbents, being the few challenges being faced, the vast rural market is almost not utilized as significantly as it should/could have been. DoT, in a first ever forecast of mobile penetration across India for the next six years, has projected a billion mobile phones by 2014. It has been said that in 2014, India's population is expected to be 1.26 billion, with mobile penetration of 1.01 billion the mobile teledensity would be 80% above. It would mean 8 out of every 10 Indians will have access to a mobile device. (read a related article here).

In such a situation, operators in this era of telecom commoditization could be looking at leveraging on mobile banking as a possible solution of increasing the revenue of the business. This could be a significant advantage even for businesses like MasterCard who would look at improving businesses in India and China and such growing markets.

What is required is therefore a business model which :
1. makes operators provide the backbone for service provisioning and availability,
2. MasterCards and banking systems to become the gateways for validations, verifications and authorizations of transactions over the mobile phone where the device acts as the 'wallet' for the consumer,
3. businesses to leverage on the gateways and telecom backbone and have direct interactions with the consumers.
In such a model, for every transaction, the telecom operator and the MasterCards get a percentage-- as part of service charges.

However this model would fail if in markets like India, operators start competing for such services instead of working in a hand-shale mode. India has seen the fall of telecom revenues and the near collapse of an economy due to competition where incumbents brought the house down by reducing tariffs in order to compete-- end of day bleeding to death themselves.

It may be a good time to have the business houses sit together to understand and consolidate the business for sustained growth and stabilizing the economies. Of course what really needs to be worked out first are the set of compliance required and changes to regulations that may be necessary for India. These act as significant blockers for rolling out of operations like mobile banking in India.

Customer Data, Analytics and Future

2011-03-27T13:34:00.000+05:30

In a time when the buzz word is about data analytics and deriving value out of the humongous volumes of data, a question definitely arises, how secure could personal information be in the future when the world would have been able to get over the current challenges of data processing, analysis, finding 'valuable information' and storage issues.

Here is a hilarious video that probably depicts the message from the future.

Enjoy, and do share Your Comments

'Face Off' - from revenue assurance to revenue optimization and the way forward

2011-03-25T13:41:00.003+05:30

If only it was possible to surgically put faces-off from one skin and fix it on the other, as had been shown in the Nicholas Cage, John Travolta starrer movie 'Face Off'; business tycoons would surely have used a similar technique to change the cover pages of business. I say this because there has been a lot of buzz in the business of telecom world on where 'telecom business' as a whole is headed and the 'face off' of the same therefore. Obviously with the changing landscapes of telecom, the associated businesses are also facing a similar crisis and searching ways out to morph into something else.

Where is the mythical 'revenue assurance' headed? In an interview with Tony Poulos, Alvaro Ribero from WeDo technology (view the interview here), talks about the 'new additions' to revenue assurance domain. In my earlier posts on 'Managing costs'; 'Revenue assurance to Revenue Maximization'; 'the Real Value addition of RA'; I tried to portray similar concepts where the scope of RA changes to include a bunch of new activities, within the scope of work for revenue assurance.

The following diagram is 'my' personal vision as to where the domain of 'optimization and maximization' is headed, and may therefore be regarded as a much larger scope of 'business process optimization'.

Why is this important going forward?
The reason is simple.
Effectively, as of now there is a lot of flux in the business of telecom and a lot of ideas are floating around w.r.t what should be the way forward. I had a brief discussion with an experienced and seasoned professional who is a pioneer of the revenue maximization industry, where we discussed that there are three most important aspects we would be looking at in the near future:

1. The telecom business as a whole would have largely two kinds of business models: the value players and the economic players. Todays large telco players could largely be morphing into the "back-bone service providers" in a n N-Sided business model, where different services would be provided to the subscribers on the other side through the telecom backbone.

2. The business landscape would therefore see a lot of 'Commoditization' along with the consolidation of businesses across the globe. Deriving value for money for the business houses in such a landscape, would be of prime importance.

3. Thus, effectively the need and growth of analytics is being considered as the game-changer for tomorrow.

What is interesting to note about analytics is the capability and its impact on business. In another post on the value additions of analytics, I tried to argue the relative importance of the same especially w.r.t the cost of operations vs the benefits derived from analytics. On a similar note, 'Ajay Kellar' (COO of Hansa Cequity) has put up a poll in LinkedIn on 'Why Companies Don't use analytics?' where he aptly puts that the biggest reasons for the same may typically be identified as:

a. They do not have enough data
b. Companies have not understood the benefits
c. Companies do not have the expertise in house
d. They don't believe it is actionable

It would therefore be interesting to note, what the future beholds and if Analytics would the all-encompassing solution for the needs of business optimization.

Do share your thoughts.

India - Is Your 'Middle' Class Vanishing or Are You approaching an effective Tipping Point ?

2011-03-14T22:18:00.000+05:30

While watching the recent promos of an Indian film viz. 'Dum Maaro Dum' in which Deepika Padukone - (one of the most popular India female lead actors) is found grooving in smoke ridden environment - I suddenly asked myself...Is that the face of the current "young generation" in India? Amazingly I found the answer geared more towards 'yes' than I would have hoped.

It is significant to note, that with the rise of modernization and development, the rise of activities pertaining to the night-life culture (which is primarily West gifted) is on significant rise. India as a whole had the concept of a the 'middle' class which was actually the set of people who would concentrate more on 'savings' than on spending. A paradigm shift in the same is to be noticed these days. Not so long ago, people in India could seldom be found spending over a couple of thousand bucks per person for a few hours in a disco, or on Martinis (the Bond way) and Margaritas and others-- however this is common place today in the 'everyday' life. The small towns are fast catching up the metros in this aspect. With growth is such a (termed 'chilled out' and or 'kool') life-style the immediate effect is actually seen on the Young-generation who have money enough to spare in 'THEIR' hands, the source of the same could be it through pocket-money, or be it through earnings in small-time jobs (and not so often, long time careers). What is even more significant to notice is that these Young Bloods actually would not think twice of their savings before smoking off on pot, hash et al, along with the very many mocktails available on the menu. Somehow, although known to the seniors of the society and therefore the parents of such 'kids', yet no one seems to be actively stopping the growth and penetration of such irregular and harmful lifestyles.

There is no point in saying that people must enjoy-- but this time the cost of the enjoyment is far significant on the economy of the country as a whole. The inherent effect of the same is the fall of the 'Middle Class' that has always been a source of 'potential' for driving India. Some 10 year back when the population of India was around 900 million, a national survey had resulted in the following classification w.r.t the income groups:
1. The Very Rich = 6 million
2a. The Consuming Class = 150 million
2b. The Climbers = 275 million
2c. The Aspirants = 275 million
3. Destitudes = 210 million

2a, 2b, 2c form the Mythical Middle Class of India. This was never a single sect.

Over the 10 years, population of India has grown well over a billion now, but the growth in the Very Rich sect has not been much. Poverty has decreased because now more people live above the poverty line -- the benchmark for the same being having income of over $5 a day. But the most significantly affected sect (or sects) has been the Middle Class. which forms the mass of the population.

The shift is fast affecting the mind-set of people which is evident by the shocking rise of crime rates in and around the national capital and Delhi. Here is an article on the rise of Crime in 2010 in the same area where although the authorities want to paint a picture of lowered crime rates, the actual scenario is very different. The following excerpts are from the same report and it shows shocking numbers:

The number of cases filed under the IPC (Indian Penal Code) in 2010 was 48,161 against 47,069 in 2009 (an increase of over 2 percent),
There was a rise in rape cases in 2010. A total of 489 rape cases were registered last year as compared to 459 in 2009.
Cases of molestation in the capital rose to 585 in 2010, against 528 in 2009.
There was a decline in murder cases, with 519 cases being recorded in 2010, as against 527 in 2009.
An analysis of motives in such cases revealed that 15 percent of the cases were due to "sudden provocation", while another equal percentage was due to "sex related" motives.
The number of heinous crimes climbed up with 1,969 cases reported last year, against 1,948 in 2009.
There was a decline in dacoity cases. In 2010, 31 cases were reported as against 33 cases in 2009.
Motor vehicle thefts accounted for 29 percent of total crimes registered under the IPC.
There has been a substantial rise of about 24 percent in the number of snatching cases.
The commissioner also stated that 93 percent of these criminals arrested for snatching were first time offenders and 61 percent of them were illiterate or school drop-outs.
Interestingly, all the criminals arrested for the 16 kidnappings in 2010 were "first-timers", with no previous criminal record. In 87 percent of the kidnappings, the accused were known to the victim's family.

The question therefore is, should this continue, where would India be in the next 5-10 years? Apparently speaking is could sound like a silod view of the state of India, but effectively could we be looking at a 'Tipping Point' in India's form and state ?

A lot remains to be discussed ! Let me know Your thoughts.

Deriving value out of analytics softwares in telecom - the question is how much ?

2011-03-01T12:34:00.001+05:30

"Mobile broadband will have the greatest impact in both mature and growth markets, but finding the right business models and managing costs will be the keys to operator success". This is a direct quite from the an article in Analysis Mason on 'Worldwide telecoms market forecast 2010–2014. (Click on this link).

The right questions are being asked given the following facts:

1. Decreasing ARPU

2. Increasing costs of operations

3. Regulatory challenges

et al.

Somehow in between, technology enthusiasts are proclaiming a lot on the capabilities of 'analytics' driving the face of the market. However, I have a small question with respect to the ability to use analytics for meaningful information in telecom.

The first question is, what is "meaningful information"? Possible answer is, anything that would help in increasing the top-line revenues for the telco. It obviously can be expanded to include a lot of things.

The very next question is, how much would it cost to extract the information and therefore how much valuable the information extracted would be? Essentially what would be the ROI and how would one be able to guarantee the return on the investment.

The reason I ask is another similar discussion chain that is on the table for a long time. Data growth to kill mobile telco profitability in three years. Read the full article here.

In case telco profit in itself is dwindling, how can the investment on analytics softwares help? Well, I don't want to sound cynical, but it is a question, I'm sure the answer of which would be available a few years down the line.

But today I ask this question is because, which-so-ever analytics platform/software et al we speak about needs to be able to check all the following:

1. handle exponential volumes of data

2. take care of hardware and storage requirements (although in theory it is very easy to have storage considerations ignored, as a DBA or an IT guy where the pain is, and the answer would be in handling and dealing with the volume of the data).

3. derive the results in real-time, because, all information has a life-time and information lost is as good as opportunity lost.

Sounds like utopia!!! The question therefore is very simple: 'How many known analytics softwares actually

1. can handle exponential data growth

2. derive meaningful information in real-time (or even near real time)

3. operates at very little cost

4. aids in adding to top-line revenues for the telco ?’

Given the situation of telecom business and revenues, I feel it may as well be a better idea to figure out a way of auditing softwares and processes being used, so as to optimize the costs and effort being spent on ‘trying to derive’ values out of business.

User Specific Attention from Google

2011-02-13T10:44:00.000+05:30

Many a times and often, when we send emails, which is supposed to have attachment, and we forget to attach them as part of it, the reader has to revert only after which we apologize and resend the attachment..... seems like one of those very common errors. But this error serves a real bad taste say when You are applying for a job and sent the email (may be just by mistake) without the attached CV.

I was sending an email in one such situation which would have annoyed the recipient and 'Google' saved me!
A pop-up that read :

"
Did you mean to attach files?

You wrote 'I have attached' in your message, but there are no files attached. Send anyway?
"
came up after I had hit the 'send' button.. The following is the screenshot (i have deliberately hidden the name of the addressee)

To check if this was only searching for the form of the word 'attach' I typed another email to a friend of mine with the words 'I am attached to You' and tried sending it- and then there was no pop-up at all !!!

It is simply amazing for me primarily for a couple of reasons:

1. This is being checked in 'real time'

2. I am one among hundreds of millions, and yet Google almost seems to be giving personalized attention- and as a user, it feels great. It simply feels awesome.

There is a lot of talks about Consumer Centric Analytics in today's world which aim to provide better 'Customer Experience'. But I guess this is what Consumer Centric Analytics and therefore Customer Experience Management is truly is, and is at its best of its forms. In other cases, all I am given (as in when I am a consumer) is bunch of text messages and emails which are pro-typical promotional offers - almost 99% of which irritates me.

This 'analytics' helped me-- the promotional junks don't.

I don't know how this has been achieved by Google, but if anyone knows how this has been done, please do share with me.

Put boundaries to Revenue Assurance - or Just treat the Subscriber as the metric?

2011-01-26T22:52:00.000+05:30

Almost after two months of near-zero activity in terms of blogging, I thought of posing a question about the outputs of 'revenue assurance' function and the method of measurement.Before that, may I clarify, I strongly hold the opinion that 'RA' as a function has no boundaries-- anything that contributes to loss of money for the organization falls under the scope of revenue assurance, because end of day, One has to 'assure'.

So to start with, think of the situation- for a mis-configured newly launched rate-plan, of which the details of tarrifs are wrongly depicted in the website (this happened to me thrice with my own mobile operator), a post-paid subscriber who opted for it, was charged wrongly. The subscriber leaves the network, like many others (especially that MNP is available) because of 'wrong' charging. At the same time, miscreants who knew of some fallacy in the configuration, used the same to their benefit and was not charged. A group of people made use of the fallacy and got away.

Many a time, this is the exact scenario for an operator. The question therefore is, should the operator create a divide in the RA, FM, CEM and CRM functions? or does it make sense to have a single view of subscribers across the network where the processes are assured as an integral part of the same activity? It seems to me an obvious choice to track the subscribers life-cycle as an integral part of the revenue management activities. Subscribers affected by wrong configurations would not be happy to stay in the network and would leave- thus causing a case for CEM or CRM applications. Complaints in the Customer care about services not available typically point to some problem in the network, which if not resolved would cause customers to churn.

If the subscriber is the dimension of analysis, it would typically tend to serve multiple problems at the same time. More so because, typically all errors ultimately reflect in some way or the other on the customers and their reactions to the same. But since it is the customer driving the revenues of the business, would not tracking the customers be of more significance than having point applications that do not talk to each other, or even creating boundaries viz. revenue assurance, revenue maximization, customer experience management and the such ?

Think about it, a rule that is supposed to find customers making more than x-amount (in $ or duration) of a specific type of calls. This rule if fired in the database, the result set when used in conjunction with link analysis, segmentation and customer profiling, would actually help in finding the customers trying to defraud or the customers actually interested to use a better offering to help their cause (leave the outliers or the false positives, they would always be there). Then what is the point in trying to have multiple systems, if the subscriber dimension helps. For the same rule, now find, if for all the destinations the calls are properly maturing, and are being charged in the right manner- that addressed the revenue assurance and network error related problems. This is just an example though. There could be hundreds of such scenarios which can be monitored if the customer is treated as the dimension.

Also, understanding the customer's behavior actually would help in identifying potential problems that may have to be solved. Example, network congestion in festive seasons is a known fact. This is guided by the subscribers' usage patterns more than anything else. Thus monitoring 'the subscribers' would help in addressing the situation before the problem actually strikes. So why create boundaries, when the subscribers themselves can help the business??

That is my thought. What would You say about using the Subscriber as the measuring yard ?
Let me know Your thoughts.

'3G tech vulnerable to cyber crime, says experts'

2010-12-09T15:57:00.000+05:30

This was a good read from on Yahoo.

As 3G mobile services are set to be rolled out soon in the country, cyber experts sound a word of caution about the high tech enabled mobile phones, which they say are more vulnerable in the world of technology related crimes.

While the next generation technology aims to make life simpler enabling downloading of movies and music within minutes, it can also be used for various unscrupulous activities.

"With 3G, cellphones will have faster broadband Internet and with such speed you can watch television live, make video calls and download music and movies in no time. But through spying software and virus, the hacker can easily break into your system," says Ankit Fadia, an ethical hacker and cyber security expert.

"The hacker can record all the audio conversation and video files. Not many people in India install anti-virus in the phones. I would recommend them to install anti-virus and fireballs while using 3G, says Fadia who recommends switching off the bluetooth function of the phone when not required to protect the user's password.

Not limited to an individual's privacy issues, the 3G technology will also lead to increase in piracy of films and music, thereby giving a staggering amount of losses to the entertainment industry that is battling the piracy threat.

"It will become extremely easy for anybody to download an entire Bollywood film in few minutes using 3G. This is going to lead to further tremendous growth of websites like torrents," says advocate Pavan Duggal, a cyberlaws expert.

The Internet and Mobile Association of India (IAMAI) points out that Bollywood would be hit most by the 3G and wants service providers to adopt a stricter approach to check cybercrimes.

"Today it takes several hours to download a new release Bollywood film but with 3G it will be in minutes that will encourage people to use illegal means to view a film," says Rakshit Tandon, consultant, IAMAI.

According to a PricewaterhouseCoopers report titled, "Indian 3G broadband subscribers," the mobile subscriber base is projected to cross one billion in 2014. The 3G broadband subscriber base is expected to cross 107 million by 2015.

Indian law enforcement lacks the necessary training to deal with cyber-crimes and there is a distinct need for amending the law and making security agencies aware about the Internet, say experts.

"Laws are there to protect but our police agencies are yet not ready to take-up the cyber crime challenges, especially 3G. They need to be trained to tackle the growing usage of Internet by criminals," says Fadia.

Duggal, who is a Supreme Court lawyer, says there is a distinct need for amending the law so as to provide for far more broad generic provisions which can withstand the onslaught of any other new technology.

"Further adequate statutory protections needs to be given to users so that whatever limited right to privacy they have in the context of the electronic ecosystem are not appropriately compromised with the advent of new technology," he says.

As mobile handsets is becoming an integral part of the consumer experience, the availability of a large number of feature-rich handsets at affordable prices or in attractive bundled offers is likely to further drive the adoption of 3G value-added services, according to a report by RNCOS.

The industry analysis provider also predicts that the number of 3G mobile subscribers is expected to grow at a CAGR of around 80 per cent during 2011-2013

This report was published in the following site: http://in.finance.yahoo.com/news/3G-tech-vulnerable-cyber-yahoofinancein-4160707769.html

Telecom Business = Analytics + Social Media + Advertising + Usage platform + Consolidation

2010-11-06T00:01:00.005+05:30

It's time that telecom business actually started looking deep down into customer analytics and started raising the bar of expectations of consumers with the innumerable 'next gen' possibilities that customers can make use of using the telecom infrastructure; rather than concentrating only on price wars, effectively jeopardizing the entire associate economics. Customer Experience Management (CEM) is only the first step for achieving the same.

How this helps?? The following observation caught my eye..... Search for a song in You-Tube. Surprisingly enough, along with the song you would also find a multitude of videos created and uploaded, on the same song, by users. A simple search of a popular song of Backstreet Boys (viz. As Long as You Love me) threw up a huge set of results although there is only one official video though. The rest of the content is completely a user driven and user created! The point is, that web content is user driven is not something that is new, has been all around-- but the question is then how to make a sustainable business out of the same?? and how does today telecom operators look at capitalizing on the intelligence from the data that is available and can be used for business outcomes.

The pre-requisites along with the 4 things that would help getting telecom operators good business:

1. Studying the 'segments' of customers allows the telecom operators to know what is the appetite of the customer more than anyone or any other industry. It is about building and owning a subscriber intelligence database.

2. Enable consolidated connections through social media for the subscribers. Customers these days spend more time on online social media than with their own physical family-- you can read two related articles here and here. Hence advertisements in social media, based on profiles of the customers would add a lot of value. The telecom operators need to understand the expectations of the customers before sending advertisements. Hence data analytics for business outcomes of usage is a must have.

3. Act as the middle-men between the service providers and the customers. This is the same n-sided business model that has been discussed over and over again.

4. Act in a consolidated manner instead of trying to define boundaries of operations. In an earlier post here, I have tried to explain why telecom operators should look towards consolidation of business for sustainability.

5. Operators already own the infrastructure for supporting the subscriber bases. It is imperative to see that the infrastructure is used 'optimally'. Often it is found that expensive infrastructure stay under-utilized although cost of operations soar high.

6. Something new would be to enable the users create the content as well as the applications by themselves with supporting applications that the telcom operator provides. The point I am trying to make is, what is the operator doing to help the consumer create the content, in this consumer-content driven world? Currently content can only be created with the help of a computer. This is typically not practiced directly as a part of the 'mobile phone' usage. Today the applications available from mobile app stores does not exactly allow two-way communication between the consumers and the web. Platforms like Android are still technical for a lay-man to be able to create applications for communication. But nonetheless, the time for 'simplification' is not far off. It should be on the operators mind to help the users create the 'content' instead of depending only on the content providers.

However, all said and done, managing costs is the consideration that operators would have to aim for. Hence, solutions that allow a complete 360 degree view of the operations is an ideal tool-kit yet the telecom market lacks such a tool. Most of the analytics tool kits available provide fragmented views of the data and hardly any derive or even help deriving intelligence from the same.

Over and above these, the operators would have to aim at providing 'services' or abilities to the consumers which exceed their exceeding expectations. Constant innovation for enabling the utilizing of the end-less possibilities is a key for driving the next wave of revenue sources.

The question is -- would operators look at business consolidation and revenue sharing as a mode of sustainability? Also, innovations cannot be made by teams working in silos within the operator, which is effectively the situation in all telcos. Would telcos therefore be willing to "spend" to increase internal development and understanding of the business situation?? I doubt that, and hence it would be interesting to see what the future beholds. It is quite possible that following Darwin's theory -- only the fittest would survive... which could essentially mean that only the giants would survive the price and economic wars while newbies sublime.

is it wise to charge for Customer Care-- especially for telcos?

2010-11-02T21:36:00.000+05:30

In an interesting article, Tony Poulos mentioned that it may not be wise for operators for charge for Customer Care operations. You can read the article here. The question is, could this be a revenue generator source for the telecom operators?

This being an interesting situation, the following is what I commented (the article has the complete details) :
"

This is an interesting topic! let me provide my perspective on this–
If you look at it, it is surprising that Customer Care could be a revenue generator option.

If you look at it– for a normal stand point this may not look beneficial for the telcos at all. But I tried to think about it from the perspective of a n-sided business model where the telcos would serve as ‘The Backbone’ for a multitude of offerings that are provided to the subscribers. True that if angry customers call up customer care, and are asked to pay there is a probability of churn– but probably there is also a large set of customers who could be made aware of the latest and greatest of offerings that they could avail of (from the companies who are participants in this n-sided business model) which in turn would help customers get the best in class service offering, aided by guidance from the customer care agent, and also allow the companies make money out of the transactions. In such a scenario, every transaction over the phone that the agent makes (or even speaks and thus advertises) with the customer could be a chargeable event for which the particular company pays the telco a charge similar to ‘advertisement’ charges. If the subscriber agrees to opt for the service after a successful persuasion by the customer care agent, the telco would not only gain from the call charge from the customer, but could potentially gain from the participating firm as a royalty for enabling business development for the company.

In such scenarios, the customer care agent really has to ‘act’ as the person taking “Care” of the customer.

This is not new, Having worked in ‘outsourced’ customer care departments for some other companies (primarily computer and hardware) I have seen customers’ mood swinging from irritated to understanding to finally happy. Some companies like HP even sell through regular customer care agents. (Agents get incentives for successful sales).So a lot actually depends on the ability of the customer care agent. Typically in these scenarios the agent needs to be able to ‘connect’ to the customer– that is a key element.

Similarly for telcos. If we look at a future of telecom consolidation, customer care could possibly one of revenue generating sources. Of course the telco would have to provide support to enable that ‘customers actually get benefits’ out of such service. Else, as you rightly say, churn is big possibility.

Last but not the least, in such scenarios, it is probably advisable to the telcos not to use AHT (Average call handling Time) as a metric of performance for the customer care agent. Typically for the AHT a customer care executive tends to undermine the real need of fulfilling the customers’ needs. Instead of AHT, the metric should always be targeted to estimate the ‘effort spent’ ‘BY’ the ‘customer’ in resolving the issue. This creates a case for creating satisfaction within the customers by lowering the pains of the ‘customer’.

"
It would be good to see where telecom as a business would land up in the future. An even more interesting phenomenon thus would be to see if 'business consolidation' could actually help in a sustainable business, or if it would simply mean that the giants survive while the newbies shrivel.

Do share your thoughts!

Noetic theory- Can it serve purposes of risk and revenue management in telecoms?

2010-10-28T13:26:00.001+05:30

Let me be honest and say, I had not exactly heard this term 'Noetic Theory' until one of my seniors mentioned it to me. Hence, just to let everyone know what it is, you can read the same in this post in Wikipedia.

The question then is, can this be applied to risk management in telecoms. I would intend to say "yes". Let me take a sentence from the description of the theory from Wikipedia "study of the effects of perceptions, beliefs, and intentions on human consciousness". Let me also draw an analogy of the theory from the book 'Blink' by Malcolm Gladwell. The best part of the book is the fact that it says that decisions in life can be taken within the 'blink' of an eye, however, before you take the decision it is the 'past experience that drives the subconscious mind for taking the decision'. Essentially what you learn by experience guides your choices. I find the Noetic theory somewhat similar.
So how can we use the same, or rather, how do we derive benefits of this in revenue and risk management in telecoms? Actually ,in an unconscious way, everyone uses the same on a daily basis in their own work environments. That is the beauty of the theory -- we apply it without knowing that we are applying.

let me take a few examples in real world for telecom operations:
1. Launch of a new product (calling card, tariff plan, service, etc.)
2. Festive days of a year
3. Installation of a new element in the network of operations (switch, mediation, and such)
4. Daily monitoring of the complete revenue chain
5. Business expansion through acquisitions.

There could be numerous examples. Let me say why these fit.
Whenever there is a product launch, a group of people always are aware of the 'things to do' especially for checking that things are in the right place so as to avoid revenue losses. Whenever there is are festive days in a calender year, the teams are cautious of excessive usage and would try to ensure that all possible checks and revenue leakage points are guarded. If required thresholds at operational level KPI would be increased so as to avoid un-necessary rushes. In most operations, people intend to believe that 'mediation' is the main cause of problems, and in bunch of places they are right. Installation of IN systems in another head-ache. Teams in operators know there would be problems and they tend to brace themselves to face the challenges. These are beliefs and these form perceptions. If one wants to study the effects of the same, it is the results derived by saving millions of dollars as part of risk and revenue management. Essentially, that the efforts and intentions are not well channeled into achieving a 'common goal' across the organisation of the telecom operators and or service providers-- the final outcome of loss detection, correction and prevention suffers. The common goal should ideally be making a sustainable and profitable business-- this has to be driven by organizational directives.

A test of success is in the ability of the telecom operator to gauge what the 'customer wants' and not exactly what the 'customer needs'. I say this because, imagine the following situation-- a customer wants a service that allows his to send MMS and watch videos on the fly from the internet (say YouTube); and there could be a weird set of requirements of what the customer 'wants'. If the operator tried to argue saying 'what you really need is ......'-- the only thing the customer would say is 'Screw you.The other operator would give me what I want!' and would simply walk away. Thus the use of the Noetic theory is profound in 'Customer Experience Management'- where the operators would have to 'study the effects' of perception of the customers which in turn has the ability to impact business directly.

These seem way too related. The effect of study of mind and intuition, and its relationship with the divine intellect also affects how business is conducted. This is one of the core driving topics in the book 'Marketing 3.0' by Philip Kotler, which talks about 'marketing to the human spirit' as a method of reaching out instead of 3P based marketing.

These are my thoughts-- let me know what you think on this! I would be eager to know your ideas.

Revenue Assurance includes Solar RA and Radiation RA

2010-10-26T00:01:00.003+05:30

Often it is discussed what is in-scope and out-of scope for "revenue assurance". In this blog of mine you would find a bunch of articles where I have tried explaining what RA should include and what not.

While debating on such topic, more interesting thoughts surface. In one of his posts in talkRA.com, Eric mentions 'Assuring Sunshine' or so to say 'solar revenue assurance'. Read about this interesting post here.

If you thought that was weird and yet interesting, allow me to introduce something that may be called 'Radiation assurance'. For the lack of a better term I'm using this term. Let me explain what this is.

It may sound catchy but "I" took the liberty of introducing 'another task' for the conventional revenue assurance domain. In India, to bring about control and ensuring proper deployment of mobile towers, the Government has proposed to impose a fine of INR 500, 000 (roughly USD $ 1200) per mobile tower if it is found that the towers flout norms of radiation. Read the article in here.

The reason I put it in here was simple. If radiation norms are not met, the operator would have to shell out money from its pocket. For the scope of conventional revenue assurance, and more recently preventive and proactive RA is to ensure that operators are not only not losing money that should otherwise have been contributing to their revenue, but also to prevent all such possible forms of leakages from 'even happening'- instead of fixing the loss.

Regulatory compliance is a part of assurance that helps operators save millions. This example is one such norm that would help the operator save millions-- and thus as a part of complete revenue assurance and therefore 'risk management' regulatory compliance (and thus probably "radiation assurance") should be an integral part.

How would one perform 'radiation leakage assurance'? I guess it should not be as big as rocket science. Radiation level detectors are typically found even in household appliance like microwaves used for cooking. Such electronic circuits may be used to continuously monitor the radiation level and report back to a monitoring station. If there is a breach or the level is rising near about a set threshold, alarms could be raised for the network teams to look into the same. Sounds simple and being an electronic instrumentation engineer myself, I can hopefully assure that this is a simple solution.

Just another KPI for the revenue assurance team.

Telecom Fraud- In news

2010-10-23T10:30:00.000+05:30

For a bunch of societal obligations usually prevalent in this time of the year in India, I had not been able to make it to writing, reading, analysis and self-research.The fun part is, I resumed only to feel literally bombarded by news of telecom fraud. This post is dedicated to three news items that I found, almost at one shot:

1. Hacker makes mobile phone snooping affordable: A $1500 device that allows one to intercept mobile phones and snoop into privacy. Chris Paget apparently seems to have been flaunting his creation in Las Vegas, drawing much of public attention.

I am not sure of there is a direct method of detecting such intrusions. This is a direct attack on the CPE. If anyone knows how to prevent such frauds from happening and what a telco can do for the same, please let me know.

The following two cases plagued India very recently:

2. MTNL Mumbai officials held for SIM sale scam: This is a simple case of dealer fraud with lack of implementation of internal regulations. Not that this is anything unique or new, such cases of scheme implementation without proper methods of activation of SIMs happen almost at random. Yet somehow the operators still fail to prioritize the issue and actions are taken only after fraud in the order of millions has happened.

3. Vodafone reports Rs.3.32 crore fraud in Punjab: Again not a new fraud type. Misappropriation of assets (recharge coupons, SIM cards, etc) especially in pre-paid telecom markets is not unknown. The good part is, Vodafone identified and has been able to charge the culprits.

The two fraud cases above, show the dire need of pro-active solutions, that tries to alarm the operators in situations of fraud. Internal fraud is one of the biggest challenges in large operations and especially in countries like India which is predominantly a pre-paid market. Fraud systems would lay only a small part in the entire operation. Dedicated teams that work to prevent fraud from happening have a very important role to play. In India, the monthly average revenue per user (ARPU) for the month of March 10, as reported to TRAI stands roughly at $2.6 (Rs.131). In such situations, fraud cases cause heavy blows to the operator and the costs of operations. Add on to this the advent of newer technologies WiMAX, LTE, and the capex and opex required for the same.

It would be interesting to see the appetite for risk of the operators playing in the Indian market and how they prioritize activities of risk management.

Dynamic Discounting in telecom operations- Risk management and future utilization

2010-10-07T14:48:00.000+05:30

Being faithful to my ideology of 'Risk Management' and not using the word 'Revenue Assurance'-- in this post I am trying to put my thoughts on the do's for risk containment in operations implementing 'Dynamic Discounting'.

Quickly 'About Dynamic Discounting' from Wikipedia- "Dynamic Discount Solution is a charging solution that is able to offer a mobile network customer a discount based on the amount of capacity available at their current location in the network. The software looks at the GSM radio network from where the customer is calling and assesses the amount of capacity available in the network. Depending on the amount of capacity available,the customer is awarded a discount that appears on customer mobile handset screens. This discount is available for the duration of the phone call. The discount available to customers changes periodically depending on the amount of capacity available at their specific location in the network. The more capacity there is at their location, the higher the discount that is offered." [Please don't charge me with plagiarism for lifting text from Wikipedia.]

Let me try to put my thoughts around risk management in this issue. For the same, I would use the diagram of scope of work for risk management I tried putting together in another post.

Let us see what are the aims of Dynamic Discounting:

1. Proper network utilization (of existing assets) in cell sites where traffic is low

2. Customer acquisition with lucrative offers

3. Reducing churn rates

4. last but surely not the least- increasing revenues.

5... others!

So in my opinion, this issue transcends across all the problem areas in the boxes of work.

let me try and explain how to do risk containment in such scenarios keeping the 'aim' of DD in mind.

1. The key objective of DD is to achieve proper network utilization. This helps to understand how the cost of operations are being proportioned across the assets. However, what needs to be seen is how 'cost effective' DD is.

2. Assurance and Management of leakage and Prevention and Optimization: the first level of checks is to ensure that the discounts and offers configured are correct, and that the discounting that happens itself is correct. This is a classic case when a lot can be achieved with proactive and preventive methods. Configuration KPIs have thus a key role to play. Along with that- this is also a classic case when the conventional domains of "network assurance" and the "revenue assurance" merge. For network assurance, a large number of operators use Test Call Generators. This tool can help to play a pivotal role in aiding in proactive leakage discovery and fixing. These boxes can be used to generate calls in the network in varying proportions and then the rating engines can be used to rate/discount the calls as per the congestion information obtained from the network. The best part in doing so is that -- even before the offers are rolled for public usage, the same can be tested with physical calls without affecting big time revenue.

Revenue assurance tools that allow discounting verifications play an important role in verification of the configurations for discounting. Samples of data sets typically taken during both peak hours and off peak hours and then checked for rating and billing (discounting discrepancies) would be good enough to present problems that may be present in the network.

However, the use of test call generators is more of a pro-active methods of stopping leakages. This is a situation, when silos needs to be broken and marketing and revenue assurance teams need to sit and work on solutions for preventing leakages.

3. Maximization-- That there is a continuous check of network traffic, DD typically has the capability of improving the usage of existing network. An interesting trend in subscribers as noted in an article in TM Forum is "Subscribers are no longer churning over to the competition but keeping multiple prepaid subscriptions and topping up with the operator who is offering the best discount for that month". Thus essentially there is a big potential of DD in reducing churn, if this trend is continued. MTN has been very successful with dynamic discounting. Maximization of resources would surely help to increase top-line revenues, especially if customers are not churning out.

Another significant aspect that I can think of dynamic discounting could be the possible use of similar technologies as telecom operators go for consolidation of operations. I have tried to discuss the benefits of consolidation of telecoms in this post. Optimization of shared resources could be an important aspect of cost containment and improvement in top-line revenues. Dynamic discounting may be a method of achieving the same.

This probably is too early to comment on the future benefits of Dynamic Discounting-- however,RAFM teams really need to work with Marketing and also be extremely pro-active instead of trying to react to losses.

Please do share your thoughts on the same!

In scope and Out of Scope for Revenue Assurance in telecom

2010-10-05T15:48:00.001+05:30

In a recent comment in talkRA.com, Alan Gonzaga has asked a question that I feel somehow points to the core topic of discussion in my earlier posts viz. Managing 'Cost' must be an integral part of telecom Revenue Assurance and Assurance : Management : Maximization & the scope of the activities. I believe that the scope of "Revenue Assurance" per se is about ensuring checks and controls (including continuous monitoring and future prevention) of any activity that has the potential of affecting top-line revenue of the company; and add to that the necessity of managing costs as the most integral part. No point in saying I have assured top line revenue when I have made sky-rocketing expenditure. I would thus intend to mention the scope of work as 'Risk Management' in operations.

In his question Alan asks is 'Over Charging' is a part of RA. In order to address this with my tiny bit of knowledge-- let me break the actions of 'Revenue Assurance' into some high level yet basic components as I see them through the following representation (not the best forms may be, yet it may be easy to explain):

The grey boxes represent the working domains within the verticals of 'Assurance', 'Management' and 'Maximization' and the horizontals of 'Leakage detection and recovery', 'Cost Containment'; and 'Prevention & Optimization'.

Note: There is no particular order that the numbering follows.

'Over Charging' has the after effect of creating a situation where customers would churn away thus causing potential damage to the top line revenues. In a digital age where information flows at the speed of thought, creating angry customers who would be happy to avenge by announcing their pains in social web could effectively have a cascading effect of having a large number of customer dis-satisfied. Thus managing customer's experience is vital form of preventing future losses and thus makes up the box number 1. However, over-charging is a situation that should be avoided and not 'faced'. The way to avoid the same is by ensuring proper configuration checks in the rating and billing systems. This forms the part of activity of box 7 (Assurance + Prevention & Optimization).

Hence my understanding says 'Over Charging' is definitely a part of 'risk management' and this is because of the fact that the boundaries of conventional "RA" is way to porous than is conventionally conveyed for all the 'commercial' reasons.

Effectively the scope of risk management in telecoms could possibly be visualized in the following 3 dimensions as in the diagram.

Effectively I find it not particularly correct to use the term 'revenue assurance' and then have porous boundaries across the tasks. Instead i personally find it easier to qualify the tasks in the 3D structured mesh under the hood of 'risk management'.

This is an open forum and all your comments both for and against my opinion are welcome.

BlackBerry Boys - Is that a cost-effective way forward for Vodafone in India

2010-09-21T15:26:00.000+05:30

This is the new advertisement from Vodafone -- a call to everyone for using the Blackberry services, instead of only the corporates.
I don't want to comment on the video as a whole for it must have been created by extremely bright people.
What intrigues me most is what Vodafone is after.
In order to capture the usage of the masses, which in India is slowly moving away from the conventional voice and SMS and into data driven services-- and that Blackberry is way too secure than conventional EDGE or GPRS, it is a good option to use the same. But the challenge is-- cost.
In India, Blackbery services are a few times more costly than EDGE. The question then would the Indian 'mass' accept paying more than is required. A few user would, but if the idea is to capture the mass of the over a billion people, Blackberry services may just not be the right choice in India, as over 25% of the population is below poverty line- and rural india is almost yet to be explored.
In terms of competitive stance, yes, the move would provide good competition -- but probably only in the up-town markets.

How about costs? and what about the famous "revenue assurance" for Vodafone India?
In India, costs of operations are way on the rise-- and if premium services like Blackberry is being provided at cheap rates, who assurances a profitable business? Now this is one of the examples, as to why- cost management and containment must be a part of revenue assurance. A premium service is being rolled out at dirt cheap rates when subscribers are being added at the rate of over 10 million a quarter. In this context , what happens to top-line revenues? Dwindling, no doubts. And now what about the costs incurred ? Are they being approportioned in the most effective ways ? So even if Vodafone make some money in the short term by rolling out the service in such a way- it would be another short instant of time before competition also does the same thing. Effectively the economy of the industry in this market is being destroyed -- and in turn is not helping effectively anyone.

May I suggest the following:
1. Contain costs by making cost management an integral part of revenue assurance to get a real health of the business. I have a complete article on the same here.
2. Business consolidation instead of cut-throat competition as an effective way of long term survival. A short idea for the same is in another post here.

While you enjoy the Video, also do share your thoughts.

Small & Medium businesses are leveraging power of SaaS

2010-09-18T14:52:00.000+05:30

Interesting article!

Small & Medium businesses are leveraging power of SaaS

(read this article at http://www.thinkopd.com/smbs-are-leveraging-power-of-saas/)

Net-Neutrality - Is it a risky business for telecom operators?

2010-09-13T23:55:00.001+05:30

For anyone who may not be able to re-collect at one go the term, net-neutrality is about seamless and unrestricted access to the internet irrespective of the mode of communication.if you want to know details 'here' is what Wikipedia has to say. This is being preached by those who think internet is a means to transcend geographical boundaries and create a global workspace and market, and thus should not be restricted to the powers of the dominant few.

The challenge of acceptance for the telecom operators is that of finding a reason good enough to fit the bill of a sustainable business model. What is the benefit the telecom operators would reap out of the same? Well if they do not practice this 'dogma' they stand gaining by allowing faster streams to content that pay well, and letting the remaining traffic slog in slower channels until the originators of these traffic start paying well too. This would mean, big houses like Amazon, Google, Yahoo, and the giants would hog the lime light by simply paying more to the telecom operators, whereas the small and medium businesses that have come into being and grown because of the sheer existence of the 'worldwide web' and or the internet stand to be perished by the web-giants for they may not be able to pay as hefty sums to divert their business traffic to faster lanes. So for telcos, net-neutrality would mean having to invest in large infrastructures yet get no great benefits out of the humongous costs that would be incurred. This is more applicable to wireless carriers.

AT&T is supporting Google in the cause for Net-neutrality. AT&T has all the reasons. It is the larget 'fixed line' operators in United States. If it succeeds in the cause, it would mean a big blow to the wireless carriers as a whole. It is probably playing on competitive economics.

It would be interesting to see how it all adds up in the end. If telecom operators continue their internal struggle without consolidation of their businesses in hyper competitive markets, it would be soon be in a situation, when telecom companies would bid for the lowest prices for providing channels for faster data traffic. In that case the n-sided B2B business model [such as the Telco 2.0] (where telecom operators could stand as the back-bone providing the infrastructure while other service provides communicate with customers) would have to suffer dwindling earnings in revenue , because of the competition. Such a state could mean a complete lose-lose for the telcos. On one side, initially they protest net-neutrality, and then at a later point fight for revenues among themselves. In that case, it may sound as a good option to strike long term deals with the data generators about the acceptable business model as soon as possible, for if net-neutrality is adopted as a standard, telcos would probably have no big incentive to invest in hardware for providing faster data accesses.

Business consolidation could thus be an answer to the otherwise risky affair.

Telecom -- A Brotherhood at Arms

2010-09-13T03:00:00.000+05:30

The following advertisements caught my eye: and I started wondering if it makes sense to have a state when one business can grow by capitalizing on competition of another business . Sun and Oracle in their joint advertisements have started to take on IBM directly. The pictures of the advertisement show the same.

The question is, can telecom companies, use the opportunity to their benefit??
The growth of the telecom market has been exponential-- and we all are aware of it. But standing today, the telecom companies are facing steep challenges managing networks, vs costs vs subscriber demands cs Competition-- where Competition is driving business crazy. Consolidation in business is being viewed as one of the modes of operation in a hyper competitive telecom markets. New operators who have spectrum but not a significant customer base can merge operations in a revenue share model with existing and large operators who have large customer bases and thus struggling with spectrum. How to enjoy and reap benefits when the hardware vendors compete?

In the coming years, imagine the telecom companies joining hands in a revenue-share brotherhood to provide a 'global infrastructural support' for all forms of communication systems in a B2B business. Companies like Sun, HP, IBM compete within themselves for providing the hardware support in the infrastructure. Thus, just as the revenue for telecom companies are dwindling due to massive competition, the situation could have the hardware companies fight among themselves to get the share of the pie in the infrastructure. Companies like Google become the service providers in a B2C business and deal with the consumer bases, while telecom companies enjoy being the complete integration backbone. Sounds interesting and theoretical.

Business consolidation for sustainability is not a new concept. But the question here is- would telecom companies become the 'global brotherhood' or choose to draw arms to kill competition thus depleting their own resources in wake of getting market share? This is a situation, the answer to which only time will reveal.

Like always-- this is completely 'in my opinion'. Do let me know what you think of it.

(PS: Please point out grammatical, spelling errors and or typos. I would be happy to correct)

Managing 'Cost' must be an integral part of telecom Revenue Assurance

2010-09-11T20:11:00.000+05:30

Business must be sustainable. A company can be profitable yet bankrupt if the cash reserves are not in the right order. The state of telecoms w.r.t spending does not seem to give a clear picture as to how much the business is sustainable -- costs are sky-rocketing where margins are shrinking. One may argue that, that investment in telecom business, means that the break-even would happen over a long period of time -- but my question is how long? and if it takes really long for a break-even, what are the key factors that can help to improve the share-holder value? Cost containment is probably one of the ways to create a sustainable business for telecom operators, and it must be a part of revenue assurance.

Revenue is top line-- but how good or effective is the top-line is a measure that can be realized only when the bottom line is also accounted with it. Only when revenue leakage is stopped and the costs are optimized, can a business be called sustainable when there is a clear view of the profit margins. If you look at it, accounting for revenue assurance without the effect of cost on the network, is almost as useless as buying a car without the engine-- the body of the car may be spotless (revenue figures of telecom) and the car may also have a strong chassis (the business of telecom), but effectively the car is is useless.

In my opinion, accounting for the cost factor is what revenue assurance lacks today. Effectively, these are not two separate forms of 'assurance'. Cost assurance or cost management must also include the effect of revenue loss due to leakage and thus include the entire activity of revenue assurance.

Is there a thin line of discrimination between cost and revenue assurance? I intend to say no, as either of these alone does not give the proper picture of the state of the business. Be it assurance, or be it optimization or management, effect of activities that intend to affect either of revenue or cost must go hand in hand. In another article in my blog, I tried to find what assurance, management and maximization meant. I believe the broad term of assurance or management should ideally be 'Risk Management' encompassing all the activities within itself, otherwise effectively it just becomes a 'marketing' gimmick without much value add for the telecom operators.

Like always-- this is completely 'in my opinion'. Do let me know what you think of it.

(PS: Please point out grammatical, spelling errors and or typos. I would be happy to correct)

India Calling- yet Challenging!

2010-09-04T16:09:00.001+05:30

Indian telecom market is like that turbulent sea, where if you survive, you play in billions, or else your ship is permanently wrecked (figuratively speaking in a 'Titanic' style). Looking through a few telecom magazines of last month-- it seems there is a war going on, and everyday there is something strangely new happening. Here are a few snippets:

If Vodafone thought it was basking in glory of operations and expansions in India, it probably got the shock of its life having to pay $11Billion, as tax to the IT department, because of the acquisition of Hutch-Essar in India.
'Chindia' --as The Economist likes to name the two most important powers of the Asian market- India and China, with the help from UK based universities are planning to set up research teams for creation of next-gen telecommunication networks.
The Lucrative India - yet look how it screws businesses up: I read a report in Business-Standard in which Gartner said India would have 660 million mobile users in 2010, and that the penetrations of mobile connections is projected to reach 82% by 2014. Bingo, Sweet November! Anyone who thought of rejoicing at the projections, here are the things to be worried about: Tata DoCoMo has introduced 1paisa/sec international call to USA and Canada in Punjab circle. That is like 0.02 US cents per second. The real impact is that in general calls to the countries are charged at Rs. 6.50 per minute. That is over 80% reduction in prices. Let the other compete. In such a scenario, if you have near zero revenues, what is the point of 82% penetration.
If you thought that was enough-- Future group has introduced the new concept of 'Unpaid' as an offering in a market that knows about Prepaid and Postpaid. The way companies are contesting for share, it seems like a complete freak-show.
Imagine posting a loss of over 2 billion INR in one quarter. That is what Idea posted due to operational costs on newly provisioned services. Revenues down, Services down, costs up, competition up-- Time to grab the share of the pie.
Hello fraudsters-- TelecomLive magazine reports that operators have reported 2150 cases of mobile cloning in FY10.
Grab the Rural Pie- Operators in their wake of penetrating deep into rural India, is now joining hands with Power Grid Corporation of India to use the electricity transmission towers to set up mobile transmission systems. PGCI has about 105,000 such towers in rural India.

The Darwinian theory of 'Survival of the Fittest' has been put to test in probably in its ultimate form by the dynamic market. What remains to be seen is how operators and service providers react - either to live or to wither away.

Don't forget, there is a new entrant changing the rules of the game completely- Google. I wrote about how I see the change happen in my last post.

Like always, do feel free to post your comments -- even if you completely disagree to what I say.

(PS: Please point out grammatical, spelling errors and or typos. I would be happy to correct)

The next sea of change could be around the corner for Telco revenue management

2010-08-29T22:33:00.000+05:30

Commonality is a boon or a bane? This is a simple question I am faced with when I try and "search" for the causes of revenue leakage and possible assurance methods in a telecom network. As a matter of fact, the common causes of loss are discussed and re-discussed in never ending circles-- and that seems to be the 'bane'. My question therefore is -- beyond the ones continually discussed which include usage anomalies, configuration and provisioning anomalies, partner and order management issues and such, could there be causes which impact revenues of business with a game changing effect? and I am inclined to believe there are much deeper impacts and reasons of revenue loss. Let me try and out forward some thoughts regarding the same. What if the entire business model for telecom operators takes a 180 degree turn?

The business and market share for 4-in-1 boxes with phone, fax, photo-copier, scanner has been nearly killed by the growth in better technology for communications. Email being the game change over fax.You might be thinking why I brought this up? The answer is simple-- is there the game changer of technology around the corner that is going to give a new outlook to the service providing and telecom business as a whole- may be something vital as the email that almost killed fax? My understanding says 'yes' and this time we may not be able to ignore the same as it is right on front of our eyes.

When Google announced the availability of 'call the phone' service from Gmail (read the article here, if not on the Google blog) the issue struck me! What happens to the existing business with the subscribers for the telecom operators? and what happens to the corresponding revenue management methodologies and concepts?? One might argue- this is nothing new as Skype has been here for quite long. By all good approximations, Total number of Netizens around the globe =20% almost equivalent to the Chinese population of 1.3 billion. (**calculation and information sources provided below) .If I assume, almost everyone of the netizens is a Google user-- that makes the 'subscriber base' of Google nearly 20% of the population of the Globe-- a staggering 1.3 Billion subscribers-- all connected via 'Global Backbone' of the internet. I, as a user would love to make calls especially if they become cheaper than otherwise local or international calls.

The situation forces me to bias myself to Google's capability and say that in sometime in future the entire subscriber base would actuallly be that of 'Google' and not of the telecom operators. The question then is, how do operators and telecom service providers survive ?? It is not that grim. Google would probably use the infrastructure backbone of the service providers and operators themselves. No doubt they are pushing for net-neutrality with Verizon. In this seeming winds of change Telecom operators and service providers could be acting as the 'infrastructure' provider for the services in an n-sided business model. Thus the sources of revenue and therefore the business model as a whole would be drastically different from what it is today.

If the business model as a whole changes, what would one do with existing methods and technologies of revenue assurance and well to the broader extent (without getting into boundary conditions) of revenue management. The outlook and methodologies may need to have a complete change. The question probably could be, should the telecom operators even own the 'subscriber base' as a whole? Possibly-- but the cost of the infrastructure could be way to high w.r.t the returns. But someone will obviously need to own the 'billing and accounting' for the subscribers. It may be lead to the emergence of a completely new form of business where 'companies' may just own the billing and accounting for the service offerings provided to the end subscriber- whereas the telcos provide the complete back-bone support and move in an almost B2B business and away from the B2C business.

The challenges for revenue assurance and broadly revenue management could be primarily focused on ensuring proper revenue sharing in an n-sided business model moving away form usage (and to some extent) configuration anomaly related revenue management.

As I always mention, the thoughts and ideas I portray in my articles are completely based on my personal study and understanding and thus could be far away from facts and what other think about the same. I request anyone who reads my blog to share their thoughts-- outright rejections of my concepts, or acceptance- partial of full. All of your comments are welcome.

(PS: Please point out grammatical, spelling errors and or typos. I would be happy to correct)

** My Calculations for arriving at the number of netizens:

Population of world roughly : 6.7 billion (source)

Population of China roughly : 1.3 billion (source) [empirically 20%]

Total netizens of the China empirically: 20% of population of China (source)

Therefore if China represents nearly 20% of the world, approximately Total number of Netizens around the globe =20% almost equivalent to the Chinese population of 1.3 billion.

Google Wave - Missed the flight bigtime

2010-08-06T19:16:00.002+05:30

This Techtree news was stunning-- but showcased an invaluable fact about Business vis-a-vis Technology.

Google Waves Goodbye to Wave

Techtree News Staff, Aug 05, 2010 1253 hrs IST

It was launched amidst much fanfare more than a year ago at the 2009 I/O conference and was touted to be the biggest evolution since the advent of e-mail. Google's Wave, which created waves in the way people communicated online, was no doubt a great concept - but inspite of its usefulness and capabilities, Google has decided to shut down the service due to lack of enough patronage.

In a blog post announcing the decision, Urs Holzle, Google senior vice president for operations said, "Wave has not seen the user adoption we would have liked," and for the same reason "We don't plan to continue developing Wave as a stand-alone product,"

Note that this does not mean they are shutting down Wave entirely. For now, the account would still be accessible and Google has reaffirmed that the service would be running through the end of the year. They have also that technology used in the Wave would be integrated into other Google projects. For those who still use Wave, Google said that many of Google Wave's features are already available as open-source components and they would enable users to migrate from Google Wave to "easily liberate" their content from Wave.

Looks like, like us, Google too thinks the Wave was a bit too advanced for its time. Or was it a failure on Google's part to "explain" the whole concept to the public. Or is it just that people like to keep things simple on the web? Google intended the Google Wave to be a "Web app for real time communication and collaboration" however, people think there are other easier alternatives in the market today that make the Google Wave either redundant or simply too futuristic.

Anyway, if you haven't logged on to Wave for the past few months, you might want to take a look at it again. It might not be there a few months down the line.

http://www.techtree.com/India/News/Google_Waves_Goodbye_to_Wave/551-112490-643.html

Quite like tens and thousands of technical advancements that are made in the market-- not all of them see success. This seems another story in the same saga.

Assurance : Management : Maximization & the scope of the activities

2010-07-28T21:44:00.000+05:30

These three words are nothing new in the revenue management domain especially for telecoms. .But the question is -- are these sequential activities or are they parallel? Another question that I hear reverberate across the industry -- what is 'in scope' and 'out of scope' for these activities. Add the word "revenue" in front of these and the debate starts. Let me pen down how I see these merge into one broad scope of work.

"Revenue Assurance" is the activity of determining any activity for which there is a direct loss of revenue in the business operations. Note-- I did not say "potential". So, what about fraud? Is that a part of RA? I would say yes-- more so because, for fraud the end activity is trying to fix loop-holes which let fraudsters get away by not 'paying'-- and thus is a loss for the business. I have heard people argue-- that this is not so because fraud detection activities have to be looked from a completely different angle. Even if that be-- it is about reaching the same goal (of plugging monetary leakage) through different routes -- a different tactic for RA and a different Tactic for FM. So not only FM, any activity that helps in plugging leakage of money (revenue) should thus be a part of RA-- that includes Network assurance and others too.

What's with "potential"? When you do not know what is to be assured, how would you know what was the potential in the first place? Let me take an example-- if You know you are supposed to get $100, and you get $90, you "know" you did not get $10. That is the 'direct loss' and that should be in purview of RA activities. When you did not know that the capability was to generate $110 and not $100, how would you account in "RA" ? Thus I believe, revenue management should include all activities of identification of 'true' earning potential of the business and then trying to achieve the same. Example, say for a telecom operator, one fine day the international calls dipped than normal. There could be innumerable causes-- but if any of it is not identified as anything to do with direct causes of network breakage, of fraudulent tampering or such, but is just attributed to the fact that 'customers' called using a free service of another operator-- how would you quantify this loss? Well the quantification could be average of $ generated usually minus what was generated on this day. But this is a complete 'opportunity' loss. how do you stop it? Identifying what the consumer needs/wants is only one form of such management-- today this is being called as CEM (customer experience management), some call another sibling task as "Customer Lifecycle Management"....and the such. Think of quality of service-- that is not in RA-- but is actually a part of revenue management. I would tend to say-- 'revenue management' is to ensure the following things:
1. you get what you should get (RA) +
2. you dont lose out what you should have otherwise got (every reason) over and above point 1.

['Loyal' and satisfied customer base + Minimal inventory time + optimum asset usage + near zero bad debts + positive cash flow] --- if you have ticked these atleast, you know you have a growing business. (How many other points did I miss? Please help me add more.) All activities geared to achieve these - tend to be in the scope of 'revenue maximization'..... the point is, assurance and management thus fall within the scope of maximization.

I believe these 'three' activities are no where sequential-- they are way too parallel-- and somehow tend to represent the same states that a company would go through in times of transformation for betterment and growth. Just like transforming a company for growth, where you need to attach smaller problems first to ensure quick wins, but also have a large plan of activities causing a ripple across the organization-- these activities actually have no boundaries between themselves. There could be potential situations of achieving quick wins in minimizing inventory time, which has nothing to do with assurance or management. Should you not do that first -- if you can before you try and fix core revenue leakage problems which you know would take some amount if time?? I guess yes.

The situation for telecoms is just like that of transforming companies for betterment- all you need is quick wins with long lasting benefits. The challenge is identifying the same-- ability to prioritize in an ever changing business model. A company that can help telecoms prioritize is the real game changer in the industry

I feel these terms 'revenue assurance'; 'revenue management'; 'revenue maximization' and the so called debated boundaries are more to create demands (and thus marketing gimmicks for people who want to stay within their comfort zones of offering capabilities) and less to solve the real life problems. Tell me one CFO who would like to have different reports of revenue assurance and revenue maximization activities. I guess all he/she would like to see is how profitable the business was yesterday vs today vs tomorrow -- while keeping a positive cash flow. A business can be bankrupt- yet profitable- no one wants to be in such a situation.

Like always-- this is completely 'in my opinion'. Do let me know what you think of it.

(PS: Please point out grammatical, spelling errors and or typos. I would be happy to correct)

DELL- What Simplicity of Thoughts can Achieve

2010-06-12T22:50:00.001+05:30

No frills- we all talk about simplicity of thought, but here is a live example.

Michael Dell started off with a $1000 capital -- and the sole objective was to provide great service to customers at reasonable prices.... The technology to be used was a simple "thought"-- a "Direct Model" for selling and reaching out to customers.

Simple thoughts created a business worth over $40 Billion, from a $1000 dollar starting capital.

So what did Michael Dell do? Magic? No -- it was about using the right set of tools for the right purpose at the right time. The simplest of ideas -- listen to "exactly" what the customer needs and deliver the same. "Underpromise" yet "Overdeliver"-- two simple ideas, and Dell true to its service across the globe maintains the meaning of the words.

The most important thing that I believe worked for Dell was the urge to outperform one's own self-- each day ,every day; and having people (the people at Dell, the suppliers and partners, and most important the customers) informed and charged up for achieving that which is "NEXT" .

Well all this praise comes from understanding how to build business empires from the horse's mouth. "Direct from Dell" is a book worthy if you want to grow business empires.

Blogger Buzz: Blogger integrates with Amazon Associates

2010-05-22T11:39:00.000+05:30

Blogger Buzz: Blogger integrates with Amazon Associates

Frank Abagnale Jr.

2010-05-17T19:27:00.002+05:30

For anyone new to the name, Frank Abagnale was one of the most notorious fraudsters who had duped investigators for a very long time- but eventually landed up being the owner of Abagnale & Associates, a financial fraud consultancy company some time after he was hired by the US Federal Department for aiding fraud investigations w.r.t banking frauds. To know more read the Wikipedia article at "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Abagnale"

Wondering why this is mentioned in this blog? It is about fraud management and investigation. Still wondering-- read on.

Abagnale was hired by the US federal department for aiding them in case investigation of fraud-- does not that sound interesting? Well all that i want to showcase is the fact- he was the best fraud detector because he was the best defrauder.

In today's parlance -- when we look at fraud detection methodologies especially through data analysis and or use of a tool (more so during the design of the tool itself) -- the basic objective is somehow lost in designing a system that would "try and catch a fraudster"-- but what we essentially lose out is trying to implement 'how a defrauder actually thinks' ... that is the key to understanding how fraudulent patterns need to be detected. If I am a fraud analyst it is about answering the question -- what can i do to defraud the system and reap benefits. It is only then the gig-saw puzzle of millions of snippets of available data join to form the actual trap for catching the criminal.

In one of my own posts "

"Catch me if you can" -- said the fraudster" (click for reading the post)

i had told how the behavior the data-stream itself is the big key for catching and identifying a fraudulent pattern. As a matter of fact only a fraudster's brain would actually allow you to detect the changing pattern in a seemingly harmless data.

Abagnale was successful because he had the mind to think how "he" would defraud the system and thus look at the available data. It was never the opposite way.

This all sounds like a familiar concept that we have heard a number of times-- but of course there are practical challenges.

If you want to share/ discuss / refute what I say-- please feel free to do so. I welcome all comments.

Is Vodafone changing game plans? Won't that hurt?

2010-05-09T23:07:00.001+05:30

A call to the Vodafone call center today freaked me out!
The IVR said-- "charge of the call would be 50 paise per 3 minutes"..... Now that is strange!
I wanted to speak to the customer care agent for activating a GPRS connection on a new handset and all I wanted to know was how I do it-- and 'Along came Thy Reply'.

I don't mind paying that puny amount- but well expected more professionalism from the agent though- he seemed not to be in any mood of listening to what I was looking for. I have been a customer care agent myself in my initial days of professional life and I know what it means to handle clients- over the phone- and so would genuinely expect more; especially when "I'm PAYING" for it.

But that is not the point--Think about it- Vodafone- India, with so huge a customer base and literally one among those 2-3 mobile operators in India to make "some"profits in 2009-10 compared to the rest of the operators-- in this kind of a market of ever dwindling ARPU, and yet trying a hand with in 3G inspite of the freaking bid value ;out charging customers for their calls of help-- doesn't that sound an "ouch" somewhere??

Or is this some stance for curtailing costs? Just as Bharti-Airtel has announced the following:

Bharti Airtel trims India capex by almost half in new fiscal to $ 1.5 bn
TT Correspondent | New Delhi | 28 Apr 2010

Bharti Airtel which announced its quarter 4 and fiscal year 2009-2010 results today said that it is planning a capex in the range of $ 1.5 billion to $ 1.7 billion for the Indian market in the new fiscal.

“The capex will be mainly towards network expansion and upgradation. While the figures do not include capex for 3G network rollout we feel that there wont be significant capex involved in rolling out 3G network as it will mainly involve replacing 2G gear in our case,” said Akhil Gupta, Deputy Group CEO & MD Bharti Enterprises and a Director of Bharti Airtel.

Bharti Airtel had announced a capex of $ 3 billion for last fiscal.

He also said that the capex for recently acquired Zain’s Africa operations in 15 countries is likely to be in the range of existing figure of $ 800 million.

Akhil Gupta also said that there will be added capex in the company’s Bangladesh and Sri Lanka operations as well

http://www.telecomtiger.com/Corporate_fullstory.aspx?passfrom=corporate&storyid=9008&flag=1&section=S162

Isn't this another 'ouch'?

When other newbies who are bleeding from the investments they have made in India, but are still trying to grab their piece of the market-- with lower-than-imagination costs and benefits for consumers, would this stance of Vodafone hold good in long term? Guess only time will tell.

..
And the concluding statement had to be.. "Your thoughts and comments please?"

PS: I have a post-paid subscription from Vodafone India

Imagine P-NUTting your way through traffic

2010-04-30T17:01:00.002+05:30

If the header did not quite catch your the breadth of your imagination, let me put it simply: P-NUT or Personal-Neo Urban Transport is the what the R&D at Honda labs have to offer you. This concept car is way off to hit the roads.

Looks cute, for the "small family"; ideal for the traffic burdened road-- yet it is still the "concept" car for the future. Why?

A probable answer for the business-mind is actually the question:,"Are there any takers for this cuty-pie, because this "cuty-pie feeling" has to generate revenue figures in terms of bringing business, if not-- there is no point in these sitting in showrooms with window-shoppers to look at.

This is just a simple and way too myopic view of the actual reasons, but still, is a contributor for this still being in R&D labs.

Do share your thoughts as to why you think this baby "Developed by The Advanced Design Studio of Honda R&D Americas, Inc. in Los Angeles, the P-NUT is currently only a concept with no plans in place to bring it into production" ?

Reference: http://www.businessweek.com/lifestyle/content/dec2009/bw2009123_776105.htm

A Questionnaire framework for building Customer oriented messaging

2010-04-26T23:51:00.001+05:30

What does a customer want to hear? Lowest price and best offering-- what can be better?
Lets see how we can build up this kind of messaging.

The objectives that needs to be fulfilled for a customer are very specific. The fantastic concept of Customer Centric Selling (visit http://www.customercentric.com/ for further details)- a propriety concept (kudos to the ones who created the messaging format) available at the above site talks of achieving 3 main points during a sale:
1. Achieve a goal
2. Solve a problem
3. Satisfy a need.
The outcome of the above three points as mentioned need to be supported by the cost vs benefit analysis- thus a complete pack for the salesman.

But the question is - how do you create a message around these lines. Here comes the next big input as provided by Dan Roam in his book "The Back of The Napkin"-- where he lays down a very basic set of questions, which if properly answered solves the most complex of business problems. Well the book is more about solving problems visually, but the core questionnaire set is extremely good. Simple -- Ask: Who/What; How Much; Where; followed by When, How, and summing up to Why.

Let me try and add up these two sets of absolutely awesome ideas:

Who needs to achieve a Goal; and What is the Goal, and What is the problem that needs to be solved?
How big is the problem that needs to be solved (the How Much); and How Much Effort should ideally be put in for the same; or How Much effort would be required for the same ?
For solving the problem and thus satisfying the need-- where are the biggest challenges that would have to be mitigated ?
When and how would the problem faced be mitigated by the "solution offering"?
Why is the cost of the solution/offering thus justified? (i.e., providing the cost vs. the benefit)

(NOTE: points 2 and 3 above are interrelated to each other).

Seems a plausible thought? Do share your opinion on the pros and cons of the same. As for me, since I was trying to integrate these two concepts-- let me see, where I myself can find the flaws in this integration.

Customers, and Marketing to Customers in an age of Customer Capitalism

2010-04-12T15:25:00.003+05:30

I was reading the HBR issue of Jan-Feb 2010, where Roger Martin describes the importance of Customer Capitalism. It is interesting to note how the business has changed over time- starting from managerial capitalism, to Jack Welch's implementation and drive of shareholder value capitalism, and how today the business is focused on customer capitalism. Simply put, it is about improving the life and expectations of customers.

As a matter of fact, I found the big point to note from the article, is the fact that the scope of business improvement has always been driven by the need sets of customers-- but the method of implementation of the same has been so different in all of these eras. In fact, the analysis of "what the customers' want", and the result of the outcome of the analysis that have been adopted by companies in the past, has largely shown that the companies at large and at different points of time are usually far away form answering the real need of the customer.

Come to think of it-- even now, when we talk of customer capitalism, -- there is a diverse opinion in the product driven organisations-- should the organisation listen to what the customers want? If yes, you are actually then catering to the customers' needs directly. However, the best of the product companies have only interpreted what the customers wanted-- rather than taking that on face value. So we have Henry Ford who had said that if I listened to customers, they would have asked for faster horses. Again Steve Jobs from apple, claims not to listen to the customers. But actually end of day, the output from the same companies exceeds the expectations of the customers. So, the question then is - do they not talk to customers about their needs?

I feel the answer lies in the fact that these companies read between the lines when it comes to customers' needs. yes, they do not take the literal words of the customers, but they extrapolate the need set to ensure that not only the customers' need is met, they provide the extra cherry on the icing on the cake. That is what makes them stand out in the market. As a matter of fact, iPad sold 300,000 pieces on day one.

This seems to be a great case to look at from the perspective of the question "should we talk and listen to our customers?". There was always this need for a third generation device between the mobile and the laptop-- and number of companies tried it out- Sony, HP, Acer, and everyone else came up with the model of the net-books- all slim and sexy, but it was only Apple that launched the true third gen device in the form of iPad. So did the customers want an iPad? No one may have thought about it- till Apple has actually launched it. Apple read between the lines.

Thus extrapolating the information of the need seems to me as the key to success.

This is a classic example where customer capitalism is used as an instrument to drive business into newer heights. But only following the model of customer capitalism has not helped-- it was backed by the tremendous charisma of Jobs who revealed to the world what the customers needed. Apple, actually Steve Jobs, has shown the world that marketing about the product's "value" and the benefit that it brings to the lives of the people is the key ingredient of success in this age of customer capitalism.

But easier said than done, in an age like this where customers are the ultimate drivers, it is a tough balancing act to determine, to what extent the company is going to invest in getting the right mix which generates the maximum revenue. CEM or customer experience management, is a key activity in this customer driven world. I was reading a blog on CEM in the age of Customer Capitalism,(http://blog.vovici.com/blog/bid/26364/CEM-in-the-Age-of-Customer-Capitalism-Roundup) where I hit upon the following:(a copy from the above blog) "

Don Peppers argues on John Oswald's blog that you need a framework for making the hard decisions about priorities and investments. "If your marketing exec says, well if we want a good customer experience then we should just DO these kinds of things, then our question is: What if the cost is $100 million? Or $500 million? See the problem? At some point a balance has to be struck, but where? Simply saying that CXP leaders tend to have better financial results than CXP laggards won't solve the hard problem of resource allocation. To solve this problem you need a metric for the benefits of customer-experience-management that can be converted to dollars and cents. That's why we invented the financial metric, Return on Customer, a precisely quantifiable measure of the efficiency with which a company's customers are creating value."

Customer Capitalism presents one of those discontinuities in the marketplace that will separate the winners from the losers. Make sure to help position your company to be one of the winners by relentlessly focusing on measuring and prioritizing improvements to the customer experience

So, the catch is to "accurately determine",how much you spend on ensuring the customers' satisfaction by appropriate marketing and similar efforts for providing services, against what you really make as revenue in return.

This is a big yet niche subject-- the dimensions in consideration are, the cost and effort spent on marketing and customer experience management, vis-a-vis the ROI. Easier said than done-- I wonder how can one possible quantify the effort vs. the ROI.

Please help.

RA ....The real value add.

2010-03-18T10:41:00.001+05:30

I was looking into how "RA" is being done in a number of places-- for all the good legal reasons cannot share the sources. But what was strange was to find out -- the "outcome" seems to be somewhat distorted in a number of places. "RA" is about "revenue" and "assurance"-- so you have revenue to be "assured"; and revenue is "things for which you would raise an invoice" (a novice definition, but good enough for my post in here!).

One of the methods of "RA" is leakage detection. But then what do you do after that. The scope of RA just starts with "detection"-- and so no point in exclaiming that $x amount of leakage has been detected. It does not help anyone-- except for marketing teams of vendors who sell RA tools. The challenges are (1) to fix the issue (could be leakage or even something else), (2) "ensuring" that the same is not repeated, (3) if a heart-beat is noticed in the particular control, identification of the real-cause behind the repetitive behavior.

In a number of cases, I have seen, this heart-beat is where the real problem is. It is chronic in nature-- and contributes to cases which after detailed analysis have been found to be a form of fraud. A real example as I have seen of this is here: In an operator, suddenly the analysts found a drop in chargeable calls. Analysis proved a misconfiguration in a network element. It was fixed. Here is the first catch. A network element is suddenly behaving/behaved in an erratic manner. What was the cause? The identification is a must. What went wrong is identified. Now it was the time to find out the "why". As a matter of fact, a bunch of subscribers had started misusing the situation-- all they needed to do is prefix a particular number before they called-- that is another aspect of the fraud part. The question is, was the misconfiguration "deliberate"? The next question is, the group of subscribers that benefited from the misconfiguration-- were they linked? Either way-- the answers are of prime importance, but the real "RA" in here, is to be able to identify all such calls first, 'quantify' the value, ensure that the appropriate subscribers are billed, compare the payment received vs, $ value of the loss, and then say, how much was actually "assured". The next step is to ensure possible detection of such happenings "before they have caused the harm". That is the real "ASSURANCE" part.

This brings another question in mind, "what is the scope of RA" ? I would cover what I feel about the scope in my next post.

A question on a different track-- how much was the operations cost vs the recovered/detected/assured $ value? This is to be able to measure, over a period of time, the real benefit of the revenue assurance activity. But then again, if it is found that the ratio is not heartening, can an operator even think of stopping such a function?? NEVER-- the reason is simple, what seems a small value today, will simply bloat up exponentially before realizing that the situation is out of control.

Let me know what you think about this.

"Catch me if you can" -- said the fraudster

2009-12-12T12:23:00.001+05:30

Apologies for any typing / grammatical errors! Please point out the same through your invaluable comments.

This is not about the great movie though! But this is exactly what typical fraudsters would say, smile and vanish. Now imagine the context of the telecom operator-- millions of subscribers! How would the operator run among so many?

That's not a great way to see who is stealing the "millions".. and as a matter of fact-- catching up with fraud is typically the "catch up" job-- unless u have a trap for every possible fraud prank. But such a vast trap-net is not practical. Remember The Thomas Crown Affair. The fact of the matter is, even if you create a trap-- "the face-less businessman" still escapes.

Catching fraud is about finding an off track heart-beat in the otherwise calm data-movement. Typically such attacks have peaks-- so watch for sudden surges. A peak appears and dies-- but the peak and the trail of the peak is where the millions is lost. Prevent future peaks of the same sort-- if you know the peak made you lose $.

Find the heart-beats. This is very important. Large amount of $ may be lost by such chronic pulses-- which may not have peaks but are repetitive. Monitoring the generic behavior of the data is of primary importance-- it is almost like a terrain. When u scan the satellite image of a terrain one gets to see the various concentrations, hills, valleys and all are in different colors and shades. That is what differentiates the plains (the normal data behavior) with the crests and troughs. A view of the terrain is not the details -- but just the bird-eye view.

This bird-eye view can be focused on certain sections after you have scanned the terrain, instead of monitoring only the sections at the first go. Narrowing down with pin-pointed precision is possible, its like the hawk-eye that can spot the smallest of rabbits.

When it comes to the question of implementation of a fraud catching tool- it is just impractical to try and spot every customer. This is when the bird-eye view helps in catching deviations- then spot on the prankster- zoom on to get clearer views-- and then there is no place to hide for him-- because we were watching from the top.

This is a story-telling approach-- it sounds nice-- but of course there are practical challenges. That is the on-field challenge, they are always there to stay.

Again, as I keep saying, this is just my opinion. Let me know your thoughts!!!

-

Rev Assurance to Rev Management :: Leading change of thought process

2009-11-29T19:17:00.004+05:30

Apologies for any typing / grammatical errors! Please point out the same through your invaluable comments.

I was reading the book, "Leading Change" by Philip Kotler-- and found it amazingly simple to understand. (Suggest everyone who is in business). It s really about 8 vital mistakes so called business leaders do, the 8 things the good business leaders wont do, or rather the things the good business leader would do while creating a better business. Side by side, I read a great post on revenue assurance by Eric on the talkRA blog. (http://talkra.com/archives/1050#more-1050).

and I really found a couple of things freakishly not discussed. That is about the need to change the outlook from the perspective of "revenue assurance" to "revenue management". No gimmicks-- no marketing pitches, no sales pushes-- the transition needs to be at the thought process before a real world implementation. So here I am trying my hand as the good Samaritan and bridging the gap in here-- and trying to lead the change

Now, the agreement with the blog is that RA, is really a cross-domain need, so horizontal growth is a choice (though debatable), and vertical growth enables the company to get more revenues. So beyond a company's need, let us discuss a few points on RA. So here they are:

Points to disucss:
1. RA as it started.
2. RA today
3. the COTS myth
4. Growing need of assurance
5. The movement of ideas for a solution
6. What happens to the "product" model created
7. Making a sustainable eyeball business

1. RA is not a new domain for telecoms. RA started and is as old as fraud management for telecoms. Initially operators realized the glitches being faced and tried to do good with the rating, billing and invoicing processes. That was probably where RA started off. I'm not sure if this task got the name of RA back then, but the scope grew.

2. Till sometime back, RA deployments was about ensuring switch-to-bill reconciliation. The scope had grown only from billing assurance to start from switch to invoicing-- the full usage chain. All the wise men realized the back log and brought in the entire network, including inventory, subscriber and everything where there was a movement of revenue. RA still grew.

Now there has been a volume expansion of data to be handled for RA. Large number of theories grew, starting form sampled based approach to full data handling approach. Everything was and is still growing within the scope of RA. Today "RA" encompasses a very wide horizon of activities across all operators. In the yesteryears, people were not sure of the need and the "to-do" list under RA, now they do, and have a very clear idea of what they want.

3. There was a time, when people were really experimenting with the concept of RA to see what could be done, and what not. Now, all of us looks for a COTS application. The myth prevailing is that it would be a box which would solve the RA problems. -- WRONG!!!! An out of box product would let you control only a few known areas out of the many unknowns. Lets take the case of mediation systems. If you think checking the problems around mediation would solve all the world' hunger problem of RA, think again. Mediation anomalies no doubt form a large chunk of problems, but that is not always the only BIG problem area. It really depends on the geography and the type of the operator. It is not exactly about one-problem-one-fit-solution-for-all (-- don't know if there is such a tagging phrase though.) If you cannot figure out the real unknown sources of revenue loss, you are not doing RA. So ROI calculations jump out of the window in real life, but look good only on Keynote marketing presentations. The sense of RA is really to check the points where one did not know that leakage existed. How do u do that?? That is the million dollar question, but in any case, and out of box application cannot help you figure that.

4. So where is RA going tomorrow. Look around, the answer is all there. There is a huge crunch with dwindling revenues (ARPU); the costs are sky-rocketing; usage of "data" made available because of the high-speed connectivity is increasing at a high rate over conventional voice, SMS, and age-old GPRS; the mobile phone consumer is the best way to reach out to the mass of customer which is calling in other players like Google, retail industry and even banking to use the same media--- thus to add on to existing pain problems with revenues, we have revenue-share-holders; and as if this was not enough, competition is the stiffest challenge to meet. Here is an example of competition-- DoCoMo launched a pay per sec plan in India. I know I am a happy customer because i am using one. Immediately all the major operators, Airtel, Vodafone, Reliance and Idea were literally forced to provide the same-- objective " save thy business from customer churn" . Who could help? Newer marketing and promotional programs coupled with exhaustive technology usage is the talk of the hour: "DoCoMo plans LTE cloud to avoid dumb pipe"-- That struck the headlines on 19 Nov 09. All this, and then investments to improve in existing delivery to customers and provide new age services-- coupling, all the network access technologies for the offerings; with zero knowledge of the fact the the business would be sustain the cost or not. Imagine the state of WiMAX -- how many takers worldwide do we have. Similar for femtocells. Well lots of people have the hopes surviving on the success of these. I know I would never call an Inmarsat number--in India and from my operator it would cost me a freaking amount of INR 500 (or roughly USD $10) per minute. That is where the revenue are all going -- only investment and no big tangible returns. Anyone doubts that need for an RA solution?

Well I do, and that is because if you look at the problem areas I mentioned , it was not about reconciliation of switch to bill-- but it had a lot to encompass across a wide range of operational areas.

5. The ability to provide a scanner to ensure visualization of a proper revenue flow across such a cross operational horizon of opportunities is the key requirement for such a vast problem space. The question is what to name this-- Dealer management, Interconnect settlement, Revenue maximization, revenue assurance-- or what?? face it--- simpler the better. The art is to think objectively and yet simply. The tasks I was talking about is essentially about how the revenue is getting affected-- and the need is to ensure that the money-ins and money-outs are being managed properly. Thus simply speaking-- it is about managing the revenue -- everything that you have billed, and not billed, could not bill, forgot to bill, -- everything. Hence I suggest the solution as "Revenue Management". (for now lets keep objectives of revenue maximization out of the plate, we have too much to first manage before we think of maximizing).

6. So what do we need? rather what happens to the "product model" business of revenue assurance? Product sale dwindles?? yes of course, Operators are not being able to get a hold of revenue from the operations, why would one try to invest in newer RA products. What do the products do then? Well, the need of the hour has risen from switch-to-bill reconciliation, and thus the capability of offerings really need to speak the language of today's need. Imagine an operator trying to deploy a 3G network with its existing POTS or PSTN network. 3G is yet to have subscribers and the old network has millions. What would this operator do with an RA tool?? Ofcourse it needs it for both the networks. But the pain are is ensuring: (a) the deployment is simple and smooth with lots of tests. (b) subscribers have a smooth transition if they choose to switch services (c), commitments to subscribers are met (d) lowest possible costs . Now costs is something that anyone would love to minimize, so if one has tools to act even-if-as poor man's solutions to address the needs, and also at the same time costs very low, the operators would like to consider. Once convinced of the capabilities the operators may obviously choose to go for long term relations. This is where services bundled with products would win the market. (There is a great article by Thomas Davenport in the Nov 2009 issue of Harvard Business Review. Suggest everyone to read the same)

7. When you know you are present everywhere to address the needs, you know the revenues would keep flowing in. This is exactly what I concluded by saying in my last post (a quote form Eric Schmidt). But true to the sense, Google really serves the role models for survival strategies for companies, esp. during transition phases.

This post is not meant to be a technical scoping document-- or even business scoping document. There are lots of people talking about a lots of things-- problems, solutions and the what would work and what not. What would work and what wont work is something only time can tell, but with the growing challenges, the need is more for collaborative efforts. There is lot to be achieved by the form of collaboration and symbiotic existence in the same ecosystem. It is like a jungle struck by sudden drought-- Only those who would collaborate and co-operate would survive the race for existence-- that is my opinion..

Please share with me your thoughts.

Visualizing Growth

2009-11-28T13:46:00.005+05:30

Apologies for any typing / grammatical errors! Please point out the same through your invaluable comments.

Eric Schmidt knows, it would take Google a freaking 300 years to achieve purpose of literally "being the owner" (well that is not how they term it though) of all the information in the world.

So, is anyone expecting, that Sergei Brin, Larry Page and Eric Schmidt, are hoping to stay alive to see that happening?? Actually they don't. But what they have is what Thomas Davenport rightly points out as "Strategic Patience"... They know it is gonna take time. But well, all product companies cannot nurture such objectives as Google-- but what all the iconic "product" companies have in common is the sense of "what to achieve".

Now if one sees the Google model, as a mandate Google offers employees to spend 20% of their time on their "own projects", which if turns out to be good business model, justified by immense amount of numerical and statistical figures, are taken up as Google offerings. What is 20% of time. Lets play with the significance:
Say one works in the company for 10 hours per day.
20 % is 2 hours.
Multiply that in a month of 22 days (that is excluding weekends). It is 44 hours/ month.
12 months a year== 528 hours a year per employee
Now say you have 500 employees. (Google has over 10,000 employees)
So that makes it 264,000 hours of contributed research.
Isn't that a staggering number?????????
Which company wont "grow" with such a contribution?

Now you know what makes Google grow?

500 forward looking employees would form the key success criteria for any company's growth. I know , this is not exactly about product management. But this objective is more than a product and its freaking roadmap.

Two things -- and two only lead a company to growth-- Innovation and Marketing. With such a staggering number for hours of innovation, what more would one need -- just have your marketing folks on their toes. Again the sole objective of marketing is to ensure that the burden on sales is less, and sales is smooth to enable achieve the "revenue targets". Today the most innovative ideas are generated for proper marketing. We all remember the first iPhone sale and how the guy who owned the first iPhone, was literally stormed by news/media on how he was feeling (watch the video at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oShf29P34kw&feature=player_embedded). See the excitement in his eyes. That is what marketing is all about. Is iPhone the best "phone"-- obviously no, it used to lack in basic features and capabilities of a phone. Jobs knew about the this-- that is how the "greats" visualize growth. Today iPhone has a huge market.

Product development and management cannot be about ensuring lesser or greater number of codes. The primary goal is to have growth-- which is achieved by innovation, and revenue targets met by marketing.

Innovation cannot and in principle must not be bound by pre-decided roadmaps and strategies. So the basic question is, are there takers for early innovations. This is where Geoffrey Moore probably has the best contribution. (Read "Crossing The Chasm"). There are the enthusiasts, and there are laggards in accepting technology. Imagine the hype of Artificial Intelligence in the 90's. What is the state of it now (as of today in a sweetly chilly November morning!) . But that never stopped innovation on the front. What is thus important is the ability to channelize innovation in direction to suit the needs of main stream markets.

Innovation projects must be a "must have" for the growth of a company, and these are off the road-map ideas. If one feels we would stick only to what the "customers want" --fair enough, you could. That is exactly what IBM did. Imagine what IBM did in the 70's. Then computers were not for the individual at home. Along came a "university drop out" introduced the world to a Macintosh, and made the Mac say "Do not trust a computer you cannot lift". Did the consumers of 1984 know that they were in dire need of a Mac for their homes?? IBM followed the the-then newbies . They had to-- rather they were forced to. That is the power of innovation. What roadmap did IBM follow then??

For today's world. Google forms the role model of growth strategies and innovation. Think of "Google Wave". Will it work, only time will tell-- but that is what Google shows as having the power to visualize growth. It just seems to be growing in all directions. So whatever it does, is that a hit-- actually "NO". Google literally has only 2 major hits-- Search and Advertisement, and they are on the look out for the third. But still it has an uninterrupted growth in all directions.

Innovation and marketing--> Revenues--> Growth : that is literally the path of success.

In a pro-typical Steve Jobs style allow me to say "One last thing": -- Google's CEO says : "Ubiquities first, revenues later-- if you can build a sustainable eyeball business, you can always find clever ways to monetize them". -- this statement is a lesson on "how to visualize growth".

Handling volume explosion of data

2009-11-25T15:36:00.005+05:30

Apologies for any typing / grammatical errors! Please point out the same through your invaluable comments.

Lets say you are Not Google, and you do not have BigTable, and you need to work with huge volumes of data, and over that you cannot invest in infrastructure like Google has done-- and as if this was not enough, you want to do analytics of some sort on this huge set of data. Now think about handling some petabytes of seemingly useful information that you would have to analyze before u say "Bingo, here it is!! That's it!!!".

How did that sound?

I was reading a bunch of articles for quite some time, and the key topic concerning everyone across the board is what to do with the explosive volume of data. We all know "data" is rich storehouse of information, and the better we utilize, the better we serve the customers-- well Customers are Gods.

So we have two statements here:
1. we need to serve our customers (which could be business and retail) and thus their needs
2. we have to deal with a freakishly large and ever growing amount of data.

I have a small question here-- did the customers say, I want the data "of" everything "for" everything? Well the truth is "No". This is probably what could solve the matter.

All tasks need data, and all the data requirements are different. Hence what you would need for customer analytics is not what you would need for fraud management. The objective i want to point out is that-- the data treatment is where the real play is. For a fraud management scenario, the actual xDRs really do not serve much purpose (except may be in the court of law). But for purposes of fraud identification, it is about the properties of the data which matters. So, that is not exactly a subscriber profiling, it is almost like profiling of the information of data-- something like working with the profiled "data of data". The delta shift of the "properties" depict more that just looking at the entire raw data. In that case -- do we really need the xDR details?

Imagine analysis of customer behavior-- a call center gets 5 calls from a single customer in a single day. Is this an unhappy customer? may be not. A single customer can have multiple issues and had to call up the customer care. Personally while working in a call center in my first job days, I have faced the same issue. (The hit was on my personal performance though, because of the SLAs and KRAs. That is a separate issue). Do we need the details of the transaction for all the 5 calls? I think No. key points of observation says it all. 5 issues, 5 calls, 5 closed, 5 satisfied events-- 1 customer. -- This is still a happy customer. Therefore that data that i need from here is the no. of different issue types, sum of values (say of calls, closed issues)-- and related meta information of the actual transaction. Analysis of the meta solves bigger chunks of analytics issues. Here i am not storing the entire detailed information.

In telecom there is a boom in the amount of data. Data segmentation based on the "kind" if meta information possessed within the data could be more helpful than the data itself. I was listening to a free webinar by a particular company, where they proposed, that the data could be classified into 3 classes-- the prime class, the middle class and the lower class. (Deliberately I have changed all the terminology and methods of classification). The prime class data is what we would be looking at in all detail. From the middle class, we really could take in snapshot of information, and play more with the meta information to track the behavior, while the lower class, is almost like the throwaway class-- from which summarized and condensed information could be extracted and the rest turned to cold data. The challenge is to identify the classification.

Data classification is what plays the real role in handling information and then serving "customers". Now the question could be what is the basis of the classification? Well that just depends on the need of the domain-- revenue assurance has its own needs, fraud and risk management has its own needs, where as analytics (based on the region of the analysis) has its own needs. There could be obvious overlaps-- but then the trick is really to be the clever manager to get the "single" work done by the two or more different "people"-- basically the trick is on thee methods of "cleaning" the data. I would say the requirement is to get the meta information from the seemingly important real-looking data.

By the way-- not always does the analyst look of the change in the meta information. I was looking at a blog post by Kathy Romano from Verizon (from a link provided in the talk RA blog (one of the best blogs of its kind)["http://talkra.com/page/5" Raw Data, Workflows and Mr. RA Analyst])
where she quantified and said, that it is more important to look at the raw data, and analyze the shifts. Now that context was for more from a revenue assurance side. But note, the objective was still to identify the shifts. -- at least that is what I would gauge out of her requirement. Thus shift of behavior is not the real data-- but it is the "data of the data".

This entire post is just a first phase of wild thought! I may post more to clean up this initial thought-- so u know-- at some point (after you all readers have contributed) we would get the "meta" to help us ease our work!

- c ya.

CEO- The best product manager?

2009-11-23T00:07:00.002+05:30

Apologies for any typing / grammatical errors! Please point out the same through your invaluable comments

One direct answer to the above question is "yes".
What exactly is a CEO supposed to do? Guide and lead the company to growth, prosperity and development. And the world has seen brilliant CEOs doing so. What are the few names that come to the mind: Steve Jobs, Chad Holliday, Bill Gates, Julius Rosenwald ---- and there is a brilliant list. Actually this is a list of Business Leaders who have shown a direction to the world, in a way of their own But all leaders may not be COEs. Think of Sergei Brin and Larry Page. The thing that is always common in successful Business Leaders (be it CEOs or NOT) is their deep rooted "sense of purpose" - which although is simple enough to fit in a 140 character Twitter post, however conveys a messianic sense of belief and purpose. The word therefore is NOT in being the CEO-- but in being the Change Leader who is there to metamorphose the caterpillar to the butterfly. How many of such people we see in and around us?

But that is not what this post is about-- it is about can the CEO be the best product manager? Actually while studying a few links, I found out that the next way forward from being the head of the product management team is the position of the CEO-- they have some similarities in their tasks of managing expectations and dealing with people. The justification for the starting answer is Steve Jobs.

Imagine Steve Jobs at any of the MacWorld exhibitions. There is an aura around him. Is it about a passions like no other. Is he the product manager at Apple? --No, he is better than that. He is the one prime example to prove that beyond Strategic and Tactical games there is the necessity of the details of Operations- he knows about perfection. Perfection cannot be achieved in a day. Even Steve himself if not perfect, and it is shown by the way he himself perfected the "art of perfection" over the years-- remember the 1984 Macintosh release ? Imagine the charismatic Steve of then, and compare it to the Steve at MacWorld 2007 introducing the iPhone. There is a sea-change. What is attractive is the fact that, every time, when the audience expects to see the "great"' Steve they last saw, they are only overwhelmed to find a better Steve, a better Apple, a better show of perfection.

During my first twitter post, I was wondering what could be the opening statement. Somehow I remembered Steve Jobs, and automatically I typed the following words in Twitter : "There is a great need to outperform one's own self-- Learning is the process, perfection is the by product- No honcho said that, I did".

This was and is dedicated to the achievements of Steve Jobs.

The word perfection must be the only word in the dictionary of Product Managers. That is something I have literally felt is missing in the loads of books and articles that I have been reading about product management. It is not that you don't have a precedent to guide you and show that it is possible-- as I was mentioning, Steve Jobs is the best example that we get to see daily around us in our lives.

CEOs who are change leaders are also perfectionists. Name a CEO who is revered for his contribution and still is not a perfectionist. I feel Akio Toyoda-- the man who transformed Toyota, and Steve Jobs (the one who has transformed Apple)-- represents the best change leaders of our recent times, and there is a lot to learn about business administration from people like him.

The best part to note is, CEOs who have demonstrated the passion for their company and their products, have really proved to be the greatest of world leaders. What is common is the simplistic sense of purpose that fits the Twitter post.. This is what drives a company-- A company is never about the share holders-- it is about the people, from the lowest of rungs to those in the highest of posts, who make the company the company that it is.

A product manager who has the power to bring a change for the betterment of the bottomline of the product's culture truly becomes the best of CEOs, but the vice versa may not always be true. Such CEOs, I feel, should learn the art of respecting the philosophy of a Product Culture from the CEOs who have driven change for the "good" in the world.

The Test Event Generator

2009-11-21T22:57:00.002+05:30

Apologies for any typing / grammatical errors! Please point out the same through your invaluable comments

This is the first post on the subject matter :)
Before i proceed, it would be good to let you all know that there is a great blog that you could follow for all your revenue assurance needs. It is called "The Talk RA" blog (http://talkra.com/)

I think it is one of the greatest links for RA and practicing domain knowledge. The other on is the TM Forum website itself.
---------------

Let me talk of Test event generator. This is something I find to be so fascinating in terms of capabilities. Imagine you are an operator. A test event generator box typically allows up to get the view of your network in a controlled environment. All you need to do is create a bunch of reports on the data that you get.

Imagine-- you know you have a problem with your network-- and the best and the worst part is -- you don't know where it is. Imagine having to track billions of xDRs per day. Imagine what if a large operator with over 75 million subscribers, tries to find the faults in its vast network by using RA reports. Is that not like trying to find a needle in the Arabian Sea??

So, say this operator, uses a TCG. What does he gain? A controlled call generation across the network. All call generated (even if it be 10,000), did they pass through the network, and ended up in the invoicing system? No-- Bingo, you have the points to suspect. get the calls that did not.

Repeat the exercise a few times. Is some thing showing up again and again?? Usual answer is yes. What larks!!!!! You have your suspect and culprit.

This is not easy -- practically. But at least easier than having to view and count 750 million xDRs (@ 10 xDRs per day per subscriber- just being generous). Accepted that there are also challenges of frequency adjustments and the related. Even then, the problem is less that counting a billion records daily!!!

RA really needs to be pin pointed and focused. I am really not of the opinion that you could go and track xDR by xDR. Say today you can. Today you have major GSM, CDMA and PSTN set ups. You know your network. Tomorrow when u have IP (and imagine IPv6), handshaking with your existing network, things would be far from being just screwed. Would one track information xDR by xDR in an IP network. You bet-- and even if you do, who will pay for the hardware and the processing?? RA is supposed to bring down your cost, by finding the "missing money". Such huge investments wont help (well I think, prove me wrong if you can! ).

Now that is just a hint with RA. A call simulator tool that costs roughly $1500 - $3000 (better tools are surely available) is being used by fraudsters for their fraud pranks resulting in millions of dollar losses for the operators. Such sim boxes could just serve the purpose of a test event generator. The only other investment you would need is to generate an interface for the call to happen via a computer. use an excel sheet for the reporting.

Again this is just for revenue assurance. If handled properly, the test event generators really bring the entire network in the board room. You just have to be careful with what you make out of it.

its just too beautiful a tool.

Introduction

2009-11-21T21:34:00.001+05:30

Apologies for any typing / grammatical errors! Please point out the same through your invaluable comments

There are a bunch of sites that provide information (and better information) like this one. But i wanted to put things my own way.
So "This" blog is about :

1. Product management: I work in the product management team of a Company. Now there are times when because of situations, company protocols and other factors, some good and some not-so-good idea get mis-handled, resulting in non-implementation of the same. This blog is to jot down such situations.

2. Revenue and Risk Management: These two terms are cross-platform and cross-domain terms. Now being in a company the works in a particular domain on these verticals, I surely will not post company strategies in here. So all readers be sure, that what I write in here has nothing got to do with what my company does, and this would just be my own ideas. I love this domain and its vastness. So in here, in this blog I would love to portray the love and respect for the same.

3. Resource of Information: There is a lot of information freely available in the net about these subjects. Some i read, some i don't. In here I would try and collate a lot of information on these subjects. I surely would not go for any copy-right infringement activity, but the basic point is knowledge is something one must share. That typically builds up intellect of the community-- here which is the net-community.

Feel free to comment on my posts, and if you want to contribute to this blog, let me know- just send me your email id via a comment, I will send you my email and then put up your information (of course with your name and credentials), or if required share the "author" permission for contributing in the blog.

- Welcome.

about Business, Ideas, and Revenue & Risk Management et al..

D-Day-- ROC Revenue Assurance v5 Globally Launched

Subex to introduce ROC Revenue Assurance 5- a lot of 'first of its kind'

Tickling Human Emotions and Blaming it on Business by a Biased report

Power corrupts, Absolute Power Corrupts Absolutely - The Story of a Mighty Fall

On a Kill Bill mission--Bharti Airtel and RCom

Building a Business- from the seed, to sapling to a giant

'INRA'- could this be tomorrow's definition for today's RA?

War of Worlds- The Tariff War in telecom continues- Time to Assure Business

An excellent read on Business Assurance from TMNG and GTB

A holistic approach to optimising business performance

Using Social Media for CRM or CEM

Here is a good article I caught up with on CRM / CEM. (This was published as an article in Yahoo)

On Cloud 2: making fans of customers on social media

Companies:

On Tuesday 26 April 2011, 12:00 PM

Telecom Asia Awards 2011 Presentation

Oracle CRM: Delivering a 'Wow' Customer Experience

"Optimizing" Revenue Assurance

Fumbled Tablet Strategy Cost Acer CEO His Job

Mobile Banking-- could this be a possible pain-reliever for telcos in India ?

Customer Data, Analytics and Future

'Face Off' - from revenue assurance to revenue optimization and the way forward

India - Is Your 'Middle' Class Vanishing or Are You approaching an effective Tipping Point ?

Deriving value out of analytics softwares in telecom - the question is how much ?

User Specific Attention from Google

Put boundaries to Revenue Assurance - or Just treat the Subscriber as the metric?

'3G tech vulnerable to cyber crime, says experts'

Telecom Business = Analytics + Social Media + Advertising + Usage platform + Consolidation

is it wise to charge for Customer Care-- especially for telcos?

Noetic theory- Can it serve purposes of risk and revenue management in telecoms?

Revenue Assurance includes Solar RA and Radiation RA

Telecom Fraud- In news

Dynamic Discounting in telecom operations- Risk management and future utilization

In scope and Out of Scope for Revenue Assurance in telecom

BlackBerry Boys - Is that a cost-effective way forward for Vodafone in India

Small & Medium businesses are leveraging power of SaaS

Net-Neutrality - Is it a risky business for telecom operators?

Telecom -- A Brotherhood at Arms

Managing 'Cost' must be an integral part of telecom Revenue Assurance

India Calling- yet Challenging!

The next sea of change could be around the corner for Telco revenue management

Google Wave - Missed the flight bigtime

Google Waves Goodbye to Wave

Assurance : Management : Maximization & the scope of the activities

DELL- What Simplicity of Thoughts can Achieve

Blogger Buzz: Blogger integrates with Amazon Associates

Frank Abagnale Jr.

"Catch me if you can" -- said the fraudster" (click for reading the post)

Is Vodafone changing game plans? Won't that hurt?

Imagine P-NUTting your way through traffic

A Questionnaire framework for building Customer oriented messaging

Customers, and Marketing to Customers in an age of Customer Capitalism

RA ....The real value add.

"Catch me if you can" -- said the fraudster

Rev Assurance to Rev Management :: Leading change of thought process

Visualizing Growth

Handling volume explosion of data

CEO- The best product manager?

The Test Event Generator

Introduction