Prone to Failure: Why CRM and Billing Systems Implementations Are High Risk

Platform limitations:

While all solutions chosen in the case studies were commercially off-the-shelf, they required significant customization. This was compounded by four types of platform limitations:

1) Cumbersome development tools
In the type of software under consideration, the availability of a state-of-the-art set of tools is critical to improve programmer productivity. This was not the case in two of the projects studied. The European wireline carrier, for example, commented that the programmers experienced considerable difficulty in performing configuration management and that it was almost impossible to manage more than three parallel development streams. Furthermore, their application lacked adequate load and performance test tools⁶.

Similarly, the North American wireless carrier considered that the front-end development tools of the CRM software were extremely complex, thereby requiring a lot of programmer training⁷.

2) Myth of “configurable software”
It is common that applications are marketed as highly flexible to enable easy adaptation to the carrier’s specific business processes. However, we found that in our cases, “configurability” led to implementation complexity. Furthermore, “configurable software” was found to be, in at least two case studies, “a set of tool kits sold in conjunction with systems integration services"⁸ and “more like a spreadsheet that requires significant amount of configuration and modification to perform any useful function.”⁹

In the case of the Asia/Pacific wireless subsidiaries, the billing system required significant configuration and modifications before installation. In particular, the software needed numerous core enhancements to address the carrier’s specific requirements for performing suspense management, revenue assurance, common CDR format, product catalogue, adjustments and disputes, and payments interface.

3) Myth of the “integrated software”
Module integration is a fundamental requirement in the systems architecture of telecommunications carriers¹⁰. In the case studies, integration remained an elusive concept, ranging from non-existent to cumbersome.

The Asia/Pacific wireless subsidiaries experienced a situation in which, while the billing and CRM systems were sold as modular systems that could be easily integrated by middleware, the latter remained undefined and there was no integration road map¹¹. In fact, the complexity of telecommunications business processes resulted in a complete mismatch between the proposed and required middleware¹².

4) The scalability problem:
In an industry in which the subscriber base has been growing in the double digits for the past 10 years, scalability is a critical concern. Scalability appeared to be a problem in most case studies, both at the module level and as a result of cumbersome module integration.