by Sigge Andreasson, Worldwide Solutions Marketing Manager, Communications & Media Solutions, HP Enterprise Services.
As consumers, rich communications and media services have become part of our lives, whether at work, at home, or on the move... Today, we're spoiled for choice with a constant stream of service offerings, promising new ways to do business and easier, improving interaction with friends and family. Only a few years back, new services arrived on the market once every ten or twelve months, if we were lucky. We've come to expect simply to click to subscribe and use new services in seconds. And we want it all delivered onto our devices of choice, wherever we are.
We all want more options, even if it means paying more. What about assuring adequate level of quality during that video conference at 4pm? And what if the contract with our CSP included specific numbers - one hour Internet connection loss per month for example - and receive a penalty payback of 20% of our monthly charge?
Well, actually consumers can have all of this today. But how does this benefit CSPs? Two observations: 1) Without going into detail, it's interesting to note that almost all the points touched upon above are facilitated by CSPs deploying new technologies, such as Next-Generation Networks and LTE. For example, increased bandwidth and new types of services can be offered to consumers more efficiently and with less incremental investment compared to legacy environments. 2) Most of the points have more or less a direct impact on CSPs' Operations Support Systems (OSS).
Let's look closer at that last point. We could actually take customer expectations mentioned above and explore what it means in terms of software capabilities used by operations staff, and the way different tasks such as service provisioning, customer care and problem resolution should be carried out most efficiently, in an ideal world. Each of these points would contribute to customer loyalty and some would reduce costs, resulting in both growth and positive impact on the bottom line. Of course, this is where it becomes tricky. In fact, this whole process of determining how service capabilities (such as offering contractual SLAs) relate to operations teams and processes, and how all of these elements must evolve to contribute to positive business outcome, is part of the OSS transformation assessment and design phases. Having fully understood these items, rollout and governance of the end-to-end transformation can be defined to ensure successful implementation, which is the third phase of the complete end-to-end OSS transformation lifecycle.
Last point: Several of the customer requirements mentioned above may very well be implemented independent of any transformation program. But an essential advantage of being part of a transformation process lies in measurability - linking well defined business level KPIs to operational and capability KPIs, producing measurable business outcomes. After all, being able to measure the value brought to end customers by OSS Transformation is key. Right?
Read more in the new HP White Paper "Operations Support System (OSS) Transformation for Next-Generation Networks (NGN)" (registration required)
