Ten minutes with Convergys' new CTO Maureen Govern

Convergys has never had a chief technology officer--until now. Maureen Govern, former vice president of advanced technology development for Motorola's Global Telecommunications Solutions Sector, became the company's first in July. As an alum of Bell-Northern Research and NYNEX Science and Technology Now, she is still getting her feet wet but says the water is "really nice" in the one sector seemingly immune to the harshness of the telecom environment.

Will electronic billing ever become a reality?

It’s a reality today. It all comes down to enabling multiple modalities of payment. Today you have a couple of options when you pay your phone bill, but moving forward, technology is really only successful when it’s about simplifying people’s lives. And as you enable multiple modalities in communications, like speech recognition and natural language understanding, where we are doing a lot of work, you will see an increase in the amount of electronic bill payment.

How does it feel working in the one seemingly safe segment of the telecom industry?

It’s great. The timing couldn’t be better. There is tremendous opportunity here. Coming from the network side, you always think that when you deliver network systems, your first priority is the features and functionality in the network, but the cost in delivering those systems is all about the back office. And just as you want to use technology to simplify people’s lives, you want to use technology to simplify this back office. And the number of legacy systems out there offers the operators major cost reduction opportunities. Can OSS really contribute to a faster recovery for carriers?

When you look at the contribution of the cost per access line, much of that is the back office. Businesses like ours can guarantee a return on investment by outsourcing. With an outsourcing arrangement, a service provider doesn’t have to purchase hardware. They contract to pay for billing as a service as opposed to investing capital dollars in new hardware. If I were a service provider and knew I could count on that impacting my ROI, in times like these, I’d take it.

Do you anticipate further consolidation in the billing space?

Who isn’t consolidating these days? Yes I see consolidation, but there are advantages to consolidating, especially from an R&D perspective. It gives a company a potentially larger footprint so your R&D investment has a bigger divisor and the cost per customer for R&D is much smaller. That can give way to more R&D investments and continue to put you in a strong technology leadership position.