A clean slate

Broadband technologies-Sonet, asynchronous transfer mode, asymmetrical digital subscriber line, hybrid fiber/coax, and broadband radio-represent a significant portion of new telecommunications investment. Managing a broadband environment is not just about operating and controlling a physical network.

Far more important is recognizing and responding to the significant challenges facing service providers as they aim to manage complex, new broadband services-and deliver service excellence-across an increasingly wide mix of technologies.

The economic equation is simple: An operator needs to be capable of providing services-some familiar and others not yet on the drawing board-at higher speeds, lower cost and better quality than on existing narrowband networks.

The network technology itself can partly contribute to these goals, but a major slice of the business equation comes from the approach taken to managing services in a broadband environment. This means thinking first about what is to be provided to the customer.

In a competitive world, excellence is measured not just in terms of the actual telecommunications service but on the customer's overall experience with the service provider. Is it easy and fast to order the service, make changes or get a problem fixed? Is the bill accurate and understandable? Is the service provider living up to-or exceeding-expectations of the advertised service?

You need to put the horse in front of the cart to get anywhere, but putting the horse first shouldn't mean it gets all the attention. The horse-in this case, basic technology-is obviously necessary to pull the services cart. But without the cart providers have nothing to take to market.

The size of the cart and the speed at which it needs to be transported will dictate how many horses will be required to pull it. Without knowing what the payload is, planning how to pull the cart will, at best, result in drawing some wrong conclusions and spending extra money.

Similarly, with all the emphasis on broadband technology and almost none on the services that might avail themselves of it, the industry risks making some major mistakes that could add cost to service providers and their customers over the entire life cycle of broadband service offerings (Figure 1).

Technology should not drive services or impose unique requirements for support. It should instead enable a service and should be manageable within a generic support structure.

The meaning of excellence Service excellence cannot be delivered by "gold plating" a service, or employing lots of people to serve the customer. In a competitive market, price-and therefore operating cost-is a major factor in the customer's decision. Time to market and time to deliver are also critical issues: when customers have a choice they will do business with the supplier who can meet their combined requirements for quality, price and time to deliver.

Getting management capabilities "right"-from the services perspective-is key to managing operational costs and speeding service delivery. Keeping all three dimensions in balance-service quality, costs and time to market-is what we call service management excellence. It is the key to long-term survival, and it can be achieved only through effective design and implementation of automated, end-to-end management processes.

The formation of industry alliances, and the cross-media convergence of communications with the publishing, entertainment and computing industries, highlight the need for addressing process automation. The service delivery chain is expanding, introducing new complexities in how services are provisioned, managed and billed, as well as adding new requirements for flexibility to exchange management information across networks and across technologies.

It simply isn't economically viable to con- struct customized billing systems around technologies, or to administer service level agreements differently depending upon the technology that is used to deliver the service. And it simply won't do to ignore these wider service issues when thinking about technology management.

If you like drama, follow the development of major new technologies. Investments are huge, and the risk of making wrong decisions is high. The main players fall mostly into two groups: the equipment manufacturers that develop and build technology, and the service operators that integrate and operate the result.

Many operators, especially monopoly providers, are still organized along "network," "service" and "product" lines, meaning that it is perfectly possible for a major procurement contract to be placed by the network transmission group with little or no regard for how that technology actually will be used at the service or operational level. Invariably, all the procurement focus is on the transmission or switching attributes of the system-management is an afterthought, or not a thought at all in many cases.

Topsy-turvy The industry standard Telecommunications Management Network (TMN) architecture, used as the basis of most communications management thinking, is a value chain with business issues at its head. Below business management is service management, then network management and finally element management, with each layer responding to the needs of the one above it.

Unfortunately, because telecommunications is still a technically focused industry, too often the thinking is upside-down, and business needs are reflected only as bothersome requirements of the operations and marketing groups (Figure 2). The TMN model has been turned upside down and now must be put right side up.

A top-down view highlights the importance of service management excellence. What business are we in? Who are our customers? What kinds of services will we offer? What profit levels must we achieve? To what levels of customer service and quality do we aspire?

From the business issues flow the services themselves and the art of service management, which includes the customer care processes of billing, order handling, problem handling and credit controls, as well as processes employed to create, provision and activate service.

The need for excellent customer care management is common to many service businesses-not only telecom and certainly not just broadband-based services. Airline service companies, parcel delivery service companies and communications service providers all need to deliver service that consistently pleases the customer.

Any service company knows that the development or evolution of service offerings is not just about doing what the customer has expressly requested-the art of envisioning what is possible, from a technical viewpoint, often plays a large part in shaping the customer's desires. So it is with telecom service providers, in which management seeks to make innovative and economic use of new technical capabilities such as broadband.

It is at the service layer that top-down customer requirements and bottom-up technical possibilities meet (Figure 3). Out of their fusion arise new and innovative service offerings. And it is here that the requirements for managing in a broadband service environment should be born.

Why worry about melding these two perspectives? Why not trust equipment manufacturers to do their best, and then hand the result to the service providers to do their thing? After all, the industry has introduced countless new technologies in that way.

In the past, however, service providers have had time on their side and the luxury of nearly unlimited people-by today's standards-to make things work. Broadband technologies are hitting the world at exactly the same time as competition is rewriting the rules of the telecom industry worldwide.

In a competitive market, service providers are having to become very efficient-with a very low operating cost base, high levels of customer service and quality, and fast time to market-if they are to survive the competitive jungle. We define the survivors as "lean providers."

These lean providers cannot afford a gulf between their service imperatives and their underlying technology. The process flows that wrap around the network to deliver innovative services must be seamless, highly automated and well-integrated.

Service providers and their suppliers must work much more closely than ever before to make this happen-those who don't get it right will be trampled by the unforgiving foot of the competitive marketplace. And cooperation must happen completely across the value chain-which is especially important in a broadband context where parts of the service could well be supplied externally by content or application providers.

Broadband profitability What specific issues should concern companies that aspire to achieve lean provider status in a managed broadband environment? The changing industry structure is having a profound effect on how we manage services and networks. Broadband services are facilitating this structural change by attracting a far wider cast of players in the service delivery chain.

Wholesale network operators, service operators, information and entertainment content providers and other intermediaries all will be involved in the final service delivery to the customer. These roles are fairly embryonic right now, but they will be part of a maturing, broadband-based communications industry.

The approaches to managing large-scale media servers, broadband switching and transmission equipment, domestic entertainment products and communications services have to line up to provide a coherent, end-to-end managed service. Otherwise, the customer will foot the bill for the inevitable "human glue" to hold all the service delivery processes together.

It's impossible to predict how industry interrelationships will evolve, or whether customers will purchase end services from a content provider or a communications provider. But we can predict the requirements for a high degree of flexibility among management systems at various points in the value chain as the industry forms and reforms, and as it becomes imperative for information to pass from one provider to the next quickly and accurately.

Widespread, fit-for-purpose, business-based and pragmatic industry agreements are the key to achieving this flexibility. Achieving these agreements will require a much wider circle of debate than exists today.

The service possibilities of a broadband environment must be factored into management design. Broadband allows multiple services to co-exist within a single managed environment-not just yesterday's static services but dynamic, intelligent services that can be profiled to meet individual customer needs.

"One size fits all" management approaches just won't cut the mustard. The competitive environment will throw up a multitude of innovative service packages offering customers greater ability to tune services to their own environment. Micromarketing techniques-"markets of one"-seek to focus on smaller customer niches in the battle for service differentiation.

In a mature industry such as telecommunications, this trend is inevitable. As the mobile industry has shown, the array of service packages and offerings will mushroom.

Management technologies and processes must flexibly accommodate this top-down drive or they will stifle innovation. Decisions made now will determine the future. Post-purchase complaints to a supplier won't help if sufficient flexibility isn't built in from the start.

Here is where newer vendors of broadband technologies have a real marketing opportunity. The established suppliers in any industry tend to be the most conservative, and they want to see procurement proof before investing in the necessary underlying management "hooks." The new kids on the block could well anticipate these trends and innovate in the management arena.

Rewriting the rules Several capabilities and limitations of broadband technology will affect how we manage services. As an example, consider billing in a broadband environment.

Billing for communications services has a long history of being tied to distance and time. When networks consisted of copper wires and human telephone operators, time and distance geared costs, and therefore billing.

That may not hold true in a competitive, broadband-based world. Distance traveled and time elapsed may not remain viable factors in the billing mix-especially in a world growing up on the Internet. Where broadband services are concerned, an operator's cost base is far more likely to be affected by traffic priority than distance.

Packets, frames or cells may need to be delivered in real time because they carry a voice or videophone call, or the transmission may have to wait a few seconds, minutes or even hours. The traffic mix on a network will drive network capacity design and ultimately its costs, with the possible result that the postal system's model of billing-by priority rather than distance-will become more relevant.

Could the management systems surrounding the networks and its services cope if this evolved? Much is known-by those struggling to make existing services more profitable and by those trying to automate the service delivery chain-about the basic management capabilities that must be supported by any technology.

Service providers and network operators must make these requirements known to their suppliers; equipment vendors must be much more attuned to how their equipment is likely to be used by the operators. And the new players-the content providers, software and database vendors, and domestic equipment manufacturers-must engage in the debate to hone and shape the thinking.

Unless broadband services can be managed effectively and efficiently, they will not be competitive and won't sell. The price that the customer expects to pay for a two-hour video is set by the market price of an overnight rental from the video store-not the cost of a 2 Mb/s link for two hours.

We have not seen enough end-to-end thinking going on across the chain of operators and their suppliers to get the maximum value out of the move toward broadband technologies. What we have seen is a lot of isolated debates, with niche players believing that their part of the chain is the most important, and with service providers not yet emerging to take a strong lead.

The market will decide who wins in broadband technologies, based on service excellence as demonstrated through effective management of costs, quality and time to delivery. And as long as at least one company gets it right, no amount of technical superiority will make a place for those who get it wrong.

It's time for suppliers to look at the bigger picture and ask the hard questions. It's time for the service providers to take a stand before all the investment decisions have been made.

Keith Willetts is Founder and President of the Network Management Forum, and Senior Vice President of TCSI Corp., Alameda, Calif. Elizabeth Adams is Managing Director of NMF and President of Rational Management Group Inc., Basking Ridge, N.J.