Adan Pope, CTO, Operations Solutions, Telcordia

In my discussions with services providers around the world, executives continue to express the same frustrations: fragile and slow moving OSS, continued reliance on legacy, long lead times for new offers, higher than acceptable cost of operations.

This leads to the realization that the "next generation asset" is still only the means to a higher end, namely, delivering a better-performing business. And it's this that service providers are returning to as the driver — and yardstick — of OSS investment.

Through 2009, the specific, driving, overriding imperative for investment in OSS will be to deliver a measurable improvement in performance across the core processes of a service provider. But wasn't "transformation" supposed to deliver that already?

The Truth about Transformation

"Transformation" has been the watchword in our industry over the last few years. However, many who expected a rapid, dramatic step change in costs and productivity have been disappointed. The regeneration of networks continues at a pace; what has made slow progress is the transition to a new generation of processes and operations support systems.

In practice, many of the pre-existing systems, processes and practices have proved more difficult to change than expected. Service providers found substantially more systems and network technologies in use than they expected. The vision of rationalizing thousands of systems to a handful in a short space of time has been impractical to achieve en masse. Data migration has been more troublesome even than planned. The inconvenient truth about transformation is that — for most — it's not a quick solution. It's fraught with expensive unexpected consequences such as cost overruns, a more complex OSS estate, and increasing cost of operations and maintenance.

In response, many have now concluded that the approach required is to leave the legacy systems intact for the purpose for which they were designed and intentionally not to attempt to re-host their applications to other OSS or to break the systems into components. Instead, take them for what they are good at and maintain them until the services mix they support is end-of-life.

This means accepting that federation, interworking and ongoing maintenance are realities of this new, more sober present state.

Yet there is still a need to dramatically reduce and restructure the operating cost base in response to serious competitive threats. So how should we now approach prioritizing OSS initiatives?

The Four Key Processes

Convergence and competition are making it more difficult to hold to traditional market definitions of fixed line, wireless, and cable providers. And that's even before we get into the positioning of MVNOs and broadcasters! But what it's also doing is focusing more attention on the basic mechanisms that underpin "telecom" operations.

Operators of all stripes are realizing that to compete successfully, it's vital that they perform with excellence relative to competitors, regardless of the differences in their technologies. What will give providers confidence in their future is the ability to measure and improve the performance of the most fundamental processes in their business.

Practically speaking, there are four processes at the heart of a telecom operator:

• Idea to Implementation: the process of creating a new service offering through to being ready to roll it out at scale.
• Plan to Provision: the process of turning forecast market demand into a network plan into ready-for-service network.
• Order to Cash: the process of turning individual requests for service into revenue
• Trouble to Resolution: the end-to-end process of identifying and resolving network and service outages.

Convergence, mergers and acquisitions and competition mean that these processes must now operate more seamlessly across network technologies. The painful experiences of transformation to date serve to reinforce the point that making these processes work across both old and new systems, old and new networks, will be a necessary objective for some time to come.

KPI-based Transformation

The key to successful transformation does not lie in measuring the transformation, but in measuring the impact of the transformation on the business. So operators should seek to understand how their performance in the four key processes can be quantified; where the savings and improvements are, and targeting OSS investment to impact them.

To take Order-to-Cash as an example, key metrics within that process would include the time to process each order, the proportion of orders delivered right-first-time, the time to provision service and the time between order and revenue collection.

By targeting individual or groups of KPIs (Key Performance Indicators), within the core processes, service providers can concentrate on more realizable OSS investments, within a framework of a more gradual evolution of systems and processes.

Such a "managed evolution" is about understanding where there is value in successive generations of systems and processes, and creating ways to extract or migrate that value. Where service providers take an open approach that looks at the costs, risks and value holistically, rather than presuming a one-time transformation agenda, they can effect a smoother, lower risk, more cost-effective transition.

A progressive evolution is already part of the network transformation strategy for many. For example, making best use of copper plant in FTTN as well as Ethernet-over-copper configurations. Much of the Layer 2+ services and transport still ride over, and are integrated with, existing network transport of SONET/SDH and ROADM. Managed evolution takes advantage of both existing and new resources, allowing a greater investment to be placed where it is needed most.

In OSS terms, managed evolution demands methodologies, expertise, and tools that focus on building a federated view of data across all network layers and all services. The most effective strategy includes a three-pronged approach of data federation, OSS integration, and process design.

Setting the New Course

Transformation strategies created in the period of (relative) stability have been dramatically overtaken by both practical experience and global events. They urgently need to be reassessed. With aggressive competition across markets, and severe constraints on capital, service providers must re-evaluate their competitive position in terms of process excellence and fundamental cost base: survival driving different behavior than normal competition. The strategy now required is a rational approach to measureable performance improvement, and a managed evolution of OSS.

For more information, please contact Adan Pope, CTO, Operations Solutions, Telcordia at apope@telcordia.com or visit our website.

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