Where is the mythical ‘revenue assurance’ headed? In an interview with Tony Poulos, Alvaro Ribero from WeDo technology (view the interview here), talks about the ‘new additions’ to revenue assurance domain. In my earlier posts on ‘Managing costs‘; ‘Revenue assurance to Revenue Maximization‘; ‘the Real Value addition of RA‘; I tried to portray similar concepts where the scope of RA changes to include a bunch of new activities, within the scope of work for revenue assurance.
The following diagram is ‘my’ personal vision as to where the domain of ‘optimization and maximization’ is headed, and may therefore be regarded as a much larger scope of ‘business process optimization’.
Why is this important going forward?
The reason is simple.
Effectively, as of now there is a lot of flux in the business of telecom and a lot of ideas are floating around w.r.t what should be the way forward. I had a brief discussion with an experienced and seasoned professional who is a pioneer of the revenue maximization industry, where we discussed that there are three most important aspects we would be looking at in the near future:
1. The telecom business as a whole would have largely two kinds of business models: the value players and the economic players. Todays large telco players could largely be morphing into the “back-bone service providers” in a n N-Sided business model, where different services would be provided to the subscribers on the other side through the telecom backbone.
2. The business landscape would therefore see a lot of ‘Commoditization’ along with the consolidation of businesses across the globe. Deriving value for money for the business houses in such a landscape, would be of prime importance.
3. Thus, effectively the need and growth of analytics is being considered as the game-changer for tomorrow.
What is interesting to note about analytics is the capability and its impact on business. In another post on the value additions of analytics, I tried to argue the relative importance of the same especially w.r.t the cost of operations vs the benefits derived from analytics. On a similar note, ‘Ajay Kellar‘ (COO of Hansa Cequity) has put up a poll in LinkedIn on ‘Why Companies Don’t use analytics?‘ where he aptly puts that the biggest reasons for the same may typically be identified as:
a. They do not have enough data
b. Companies have not understood the benefits
c. Companies do not have the expertise in house
d. They don’t believe it is actionable
It would therefore be interesting to note, what the future beholds and if Analytics would the all-encompassing solution for the needs of business optimization.
Do share your thoughts.
A View from Outside 
The following is a 'thought process' as shared by a Senior:"The way I see it –In the current context, most telecom operators (and even companies in other verticals) have a BI department, some BI solution and people with BI skillsets doing bread-and –butter BI, which means churning out reports from aggregated datasets. Not much top-end BI being done – predictive analysis to be particular, as you really do not have good usable tools for business analysts. SAS is usable by programmers and statistics, who lack domain knowledge, and sometimes lack a knack for it. RA should cover more of the financial areas (cost optimization for example) and continue to bridge the gap between technology and finance. But, it should steer clear of marketing areas (churn management, marketing-oriented CEM). Why so? a. Departmental objectives!b. You cannot have everyone doing everything.c. Finance is well structured, very objective and traditional – and RA is finance’s baby. Marketing is still subjective. The underlying ideology of these two departments is different – and RA should not be on both boats.d. your investors (including shareholders) hate subjectivity. They want clear, concise answers – which only Finance can providee. RA should stick to where the money is – Finance!"