By Drew Rockwell
Communications and media providers find themselves in increasingly competitive markets – competing among peer competitors, cross-industry communications and media or with non-peer virtual network operators (VNOs). To win in these markets, providers are increasing their focus on analytics as one method to improve market share and increase their share of the customer’s wallet, reduce churn and time-to-market and other key performance measures.
As a result, many providers are using operational excellence to win. Operational excellence has broad meaning that includes the following examples: using operational performance to please customers across touch points; achieving first-to-market advantage using streamlined product development and delivery processes; proactively detecting and addressing revenue and customer risk for new and mature products so that the providers can avoid unnecessary revenue loss or inaccuracies that frustrate customers.
Competing and winning on the basis of operational excellence is easier said than done. To achieve excellence, telecom and media providers must confront three dominant business process realities: 1) Operations are composed of integrated processes that span numerous business functions and systems. 2) Business rules that govern process performance are highly conditional, opaque, and often hidden inside IT systems. 3) The data that fuels processes is rapidly growing, dynamic, diverse in format and managed (sometimes as silos) across a set of operational systems, warehouses, and user desktops. In other words, today’s processes are big, dense, and often opaque to the business stakeholders attempting to de-risk, improve, or capitalize on them.
There are many factors involved in overcoming business process challenges; arguably, one of the most important is gaining visibility to the processes themselves. Using the logic that “one cannot solve what one cannot see," process visualization becomes a gating factor to controlling and harnessing business processes.
