The Analyst's Corner: Eating their own dog food

Big phone companies like to lecture others on why they should e-enable their businesses. Yet you can't order a DSL line through the Web. While we can blame the outdated, incompatible telco OSS for this problem, help is on the way

E-commerce is more than just having a pretty Web interface where people can click on the “checkout” icon and place orders for toys and books. It means that Web orders flow downstream through automated systems with a minimum of human intervention.

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It’s not e-commerce if the Web orders pile up in some clerk’s e-mail account. Yet that’s exactly what they’d do at most phone companies. Why? Because of their creaky operations support systems (OSSs), which are supposed to track orders, activate services and initiate billing.

Although flow-through provisioning is the ideal, most of the time orders just sit in someone’s in-basket. One equipment manufacturer estimates that of the 60 days it takes to provision a data service, 58 ½ days are spent bouncing orders between various departments and systems.

Yes, life was simpler when telcos enjoyed monopoly privileges in the local exchange. Product offerings were simple and slow to change, and service delivery was leisurely. Competition and the explosion in new services have strained legacy OSS systems.

For example, Ameritech’s billing system has to keep track of more than 5000 billing plans. Big carrier merger mania has also burdened harried IT staffs with the job of melding disparate systems. The result: layers upon layers of multiple service ordering systems, customer databases and switches that may not be on speaking terms and often spawn bad data requiring even more manual babysitting.

So why not just scrap the old system and and start over?

That’s exactly what Pacific Bell tried to do. The project burned through $250 million before it was halted when it choked on the complexity of migrating 30 years of undocumented business rules. Another carrier is in its 10th year of consolidating multiple billing platforms with no end in sight.

10 Principles  for OSS Rejuvenation Abandon delusions of top-to-bottom OSS overhauls–keep the existing OSS framework and replace components one at a time. Predefine common strategic architectures for applications, operations and network delivery. Develop an EAI migration plan with a potentially big role for off-the-shelf EAI software. Enforce interoperability requirements on business divisions–even at the expense of time to market. Centralize and make available vital information with standardized workflow management, EAI and Web-based interfaces. Plan for the reality that off-the-shelf software apps are still going to require much customization. Sacrifice bells and whistles in favor of software flexibility and ease of training. Simplify business processes first before integrating new applications. Negotiate risk-sharing performance contracts with your systems integrators and restrain them from repackaging your hard-won information for competitors. Plan now for the massive OSS implications of future migrations of circuit and data networks to IP/optical networking platforms.

These disasters have hurt customers, service workers, trading partners and the careers of telecom IT executives--but are incredibly lucrative for big systems integrators that can extract tens of millions of dollars of fees per project.

Not surprisingly, most big carriers are now taking a more cautious approach to OSS overhauls. In search of simplicity, large telcos are looking at off-the-shelf applications as an alternative to building everything in-house. By going for best-of-breed applications, they hope to weave together solutions that are cheaper and quicker.

The reality with off-the-shelf software is a different story: limited interoperability with other applications, conflicting data models and questionable scalability. In fact, big carriers still must apply so much customization to off-the-shelf software that the term “development kit” may be more appropriate than “prepackaged software application.”

However, there is a bright light on the horizon: new enterprise application integration (EAI) software. EAI speeds the integration of off-the-shelf and legacy applications and makes application interfaces easier to maintain. 

Think of it as providing a common platform such as Windows: Applications only need to be aligned with the underlying architecture, not with each other. By removing many inter-application obstacles, EAI software will make it easier for telecom software vendors to create best of breed niche software.

But there are still hurdles to overcome. EAI is good at inter-application messaging but does not improve the quality of messages or ensure that they’re being forwarded to the right places. EAI software needs better integration with workflow management tools to create more process-oriented, out-of-the-box, solutions.

Scalability is also an issue. Typical EAI hub-and-spoke topology results in the creation of multiple hubs that can act as bottlenecks when a telco has to process millions of call detail records per day. These problems are being addressed, though, and should not be long-term impediments to the central role the new EAI software will play in the rejuvenated OSSs of the future.

Telecom IT executives are tentatively finding their feet in the OSS quagmire. They’re letting go of delusions of top-to-bottom overhauls and learning to accept the millions of lines of code and hundreds of man years of processes entombed in their legacy OSSs. They're looking for simplicity, common standards that will allow them to plug in new applications one at a time, and understanding as they impose the gospel of interoperability on their business units.

If they are successful, big telcos could morph from being laggards to leaders in e-commerce.
Paul Preston is a manager at Adventis in San Francisco. His e-mail address is preston@adventis.com.
This column originally appeared on the internetTelephony.com website.

Visit Adventis on the web at www.adventis.com.

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Operations Support Systems (OSSs) Tutorial

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OSS Essentials:
Support Systems Solutions for Service Providers
by Kornel Terplan
Paperback - 320 pages (January 26, 2001)
$29.99
Order this book.
Note:This item will be published on January 26, 2001.
It can be ordered now and it will be shipped when it arrives.

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