Journey To the Center of the BSS/OSS World

By Larry Lannon

I spent most of last week at B/OSS Live! From the jump, I knew I was leaving the wet, cold Midwestern spring for the warmer, drier East Coast. What I did not realize, fully, until B/OSS was over, was how I was taking another journey, an educational journey that fundamentally changed the way I understand the BSS/OSS profession. It was a journey that started long ago, in a different world. Give me a few minutes to explain.

I am naïve. When I think of your profession, the first thing I think of is technology, of powerful systems, interconnected networks, incredibly complex databases. I think of things, processes, “work products." I do not think of people, much less the individual person.

I suppose one reason I have had this concept so firmly embedded in my mind is because I am naïve – but, truthfully, it was also how telecom professionals described the back office when I started working as the rawest telecom reporter in the world back in 1976. When I wrote my first telecom story, the clumsy but earnest incumbent President Gerald Ford had just lost the 1976 U.S. national election to Jimmy Carter, but the ill-fated, toothsome Georgian was still a few months from taking office – and I was a few months from understanding anything at all about the regulated telecom industry I would write about for the next quarter-century. (By the way, the verb “regulated" is from the classical Latin and originally meant “customers last, shareholders first." Fortunately, the verb is most accurately used in the past tense.)

Things thankfully have changed. Communications customers – impatient, needy, demanding, experimental, productive, demanding, hundreds of millions strong all around the world – have sparked a telecommunications revolution no less radical than the political and cultural upheavals that have characterized the past 35-plus years. Remember Fleetwood Mac? The Cold War?

Today the customer experience is the center of any meaningful business strategy developed by any communications service provider anywhere in the world. Decisions about technology, systems and processes now are all subordinated to the effort to enable a better customer experience.

Human communications – which began with individual people talking directly to one another, supplemented by innovations as simple and powerful as a handshake – is coming full circle, putting the individual communicator where she or he belongs, at the center of the world.

That was the journey I took last week at B/OSS Live! I was amazed at how sophisticated the speakers at our conference were in addressing the imperative to refine and improve the customer experience. There were discussions of how to use the latest aspects of social media to connect with, and satisfy, customers. There were numerous discussions of how to absorb lessons from the retail sector, from companies like Nordstrom and Home Depot, and deliver services consumers want, precisely when and where they want them, and at price points that are productive for them.

Arching above the entire discussion was the critical realization that the context within which consumers use their services is never stagnant. Demand is constantly being changed by a multitude of factors, including new time pressures, new options, new economic circumstances and new expectations. People are dynamic. A consumption model that prizes personalized services above all, therefore, can be no less dynamic than the most dynamic consumers.

BOSS’ program, in my opinion, reflected the signature dynamism of the contemporary consumption model. I heard speakers as diverse as Nsight’s Rob Riordan, CHR Solutions’ Fredel Thomas, Sprint’s Scott Rice – and many, many more – push attendees to truly come to grips with the implications of this customer-centric reality. However, at least as important as the presentations themselves was the informal discussion about what this reality means, how to adapt to it, and ultimately to get ahead of it.

Business transformation is a pregnant phrase. Too often it can be devoid of any specific meaning. But as far as I’m concerned, no other phrase conveys the changes that have occurred in the past few decades in the BSS/OSS community, changes I did not fully comprehend until last week’s B/OSS Live!

My personal journey last week was a journey to the center of the BSS/OSS world. When I got there, I realized the journey was not over – and it cannot be over, as long as customers rule the world.

Which they do.

Larry Lannon is group publisher of VIRGO ’s Communications Network.