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

At the European wireline carrier, the complexity derived from the need to develop middleware capable to abstract interface requirements was beyond the expertise of the original systems integration technical team¹⁴. A similar situation occurred at the Latin American wireless carrier. In both cases, the solution was to force the systems integrator to improve the profile of the team and bring in additional in-house IT staff that assumed the responsibility of key project steps that required in-depth knowledge of the business¹⁵ (see figure 3 below).

Figure 3. Tasks assumed by in-house IT staff

Interestingly enough, in two projects that were completed after significant delays, the critical failure point was the integration layer. In the other one, integration was a concern from the start since the initial solution did not work. As a result, it was addressed mid-way and worked well. To sum up, each case study had more than one factor contributing to the outcome (see figure 4 below).

Figure 4. Primary areas contributing to the outcome

Conclusion:

The analysis of the five case studies is quite enlightening with regard to the reasons why complex billing and CRM systems projects in the telecommunications industry tend to fail. Some of the drivers are quite common and not necessarily specific to the industry. In fact, best practices already have been codified to address issues such as limited user involvement, or faulty project governance.

Nevertheless, the studies identified a number of factors that are specific to telecommunications. Carriers should pay attention to the management of complexity limiting the scope of areas of systems renewal to be addressed simultaneously. Sequential implementation might be advisable in order to limit the complexity attached to whole transformation projects.

In addition, the selection of commercial off-the shelf packages needs to be tackled very carefully, particularly when it comes to differentiating between the promise of integration and configurability and reality, or when assessing the true scalability capacity of an application. In particular, the product integration capability (especially, its integration layer) has a tremendous impact on the project’s likelihood of success. Along these lines, the evaluation of product maturity is a critical assessment metric when selecting a commercial off-the-shelf package.