OSS/BSS: What Does the Future Hold?

Service fulfillment is one of the twin pillars of the traditional OSS/BSS architecture, turning customer orders into active communication services and mirroring a parallel flow of chargeable records from network to bill. But these straightforward days are fast disappearing-are we now witnessing fulfillment's final finale?

Together, OSS and BSS have perfectly illustrated the concept of a vertically integrated telco industry, one in which the operator owned and controlled customers, network resources, and services within an enclosed and tightly
managed environment.

The Age of Aggregation

However now things are not so simple. Few service providers base their offerings on a single basic communications service. Many are stretching their proposition well beyond connections, creating, for example, cloud based infrastructure and software offerings, enterprise machine-to-machine (M2M) applications, and bespoke solutions for financial, medical, and many other 'verticals'. Service providers everywhere are enriching their propositions with content that allows them to be more competitive in increasingly open telecom markets.

Almost un-noticed, many service providers have become service aggregators, creating 'blended' products which combine their own services and capabilities with elements provided by partners and external suppliers. Activating these new products, given their more complex make-up, and the number of external factors on which they depend, places far greater demands on legacy systems and processes than they were ever designed to support.

What does it mean to software vendors? It means that for any product or solution-not just CEM products-to be taken seriously, they need to be couched increasingly in the context of the customer experience. Does my fulfillment deliver a slicker, more faultless, and trouble-free experience for my customer? Does my charging platform allow customers the payment options they appreciate? Is my policy control focused on the network or on my customers? Do all of these functions act together to allow me the holy grail of customer management, a 'holistic' customer view that pulls together customer information from CRM to HLR and lets me provide a wholly personalized service?

New 'Customers' for Fulfillment

Service orders too are changing. The 'order'-really just a demand for change-may not be coming through a CRM or conventional order capture system, but from the handset, as the customer enhances a 'vanilla' SIM with a set of personally selected services. Or it may be coming through a policy control or automated marketing platform which dictates the need to upgrade or modify the subscriber's service, perhaps only for a trial period (what we might call 'event-driven fulfillment').

Wholesale carriers will need to handle service requests from multiple partners and virtual network operators, often alongside service orders from their own direct customers.

Increasingly, service orders may not relate to conventional telecom services at all, but perhaps to an embedded communications device-in a vehicle, or a piece of consumer electronics, for example, part of a bespoke solution for major enterprise customers.

In short, telco is evolving into a much more complex landscape. The value chain to the customer is being constantly stretched and the new telco environment is much more complex than the clean lines and layers of a straightforward GSM operation. To adapt an old industry metaphor, it feels like our carefully assembled 'lasagne' is fast reverting to a spaghetti alla puttanesca...

Evolutionary Adaptation

So service fulfillment needs to adapt to this changing world. The ever-increasing range of products that almost every service provider wishes to bring to market means that the traditional approach of 'hand tooling' processes for each product no longer plays. Future fulfillment needs to draw on service elements and capabilities that are rationalized and cataloged in a way which allows service assembly and delivery to be largely automated.

Fulfillment also needs to recognize that it only supports a business-to-customer relationship, but will have to support many business-to-business relationships too. Service fulfillment must be able to reach out 'horizontally', as well as vertically connecting customers and networks.

Finally, we know that this all needs to be cost-effective. Service fulfillment needs to be a 'lean' process that commits resources at the last minute, minimizes wasted effort and demands on cash flow, and adds as little as possible to the unit cost-of-sale of any product or service.

Supporting Future Fulfillment

What needs to be in place to support this new world of service fulfillment?

• A flexible and adaptable approach to product and service management is a fundamental requirement. Creating a new order process for every product or bundle of services offers no possibility of scaling and will slow market responsiveness.

A 'catalog-driven' approach that rationalizes the many components involved in order fulfillment-from partners and suppliers to products, services, and network elements-and allows these to be quickly assembled into new processes, offers much greater resilience, as well as vital cost-effectiveness.

• Service fulfillment needs to be 'context-aware'-understanding the 'real status' of available resources in the fulfillment process minimizes error and unnecessary effort, and recognizes the service and technology context into which the customer's order will be delivered. This ensures that new services are compatible with the customer's current state, minimizing the errors that drive costs up and loyalty down.
• Service fulfillment needs to be fast and responsive. An order for fiber rollout can't be fulfilled in micro-seconds, but upgrades to service features and characteristics certainly can. Any avoidable delay in the process lowers the quality of the customer experience and delays precious revenue to the service provider.
• Finally, service fulfillment needs to be 'open'-based not just on common standards and protocols, but supporting easy communication between the service provider and the partners who make a critical contribution to delivery. Order fulfillment needs to have more in common with the delivery processes of major online retailers-spinning up service orders that may require, entirely or in part, the co-ordinated resources of many suppliers.

In Conclusion: Untangling the Spaghetti

So are we seeing service fulfillment returning to a 'spaghetti' of interconnecting processes, communications and service elements? It's a real and dangerous possibility, one that could stymie service providers' ambitions to transform their business, introduce radically different propositions, and bring in very different kinds of revenue.

The good news is that the capability now exists to deploy a new kind of rational, responsive, and performant service fulfillment-one which is optimized for the demands of the future telco rather than oriented towards increasingly unproductive legacy services-fulfillment environments that offer proven baseline capability and performance, but which can be configured and reconfigured almost indefinitely to support whatever the future service provider wishes to sell.