Pennies From Heaven

With so many faces turned skyward in song and prayer over the weekend, it surely must be only a matter of time before good tidings and good fortune begin to rain down upon us. But if you're in the accounting department of a local or long-distance telco or any other communications service provider and wondering how you're going to square your books by year's end, don't hold out for a shower of pennies from heaven. Pennies from heaven, like Santa, (spoiler alert) aren't real.

The real pennies are still pinging, clinking and rolling around the pipes of the billing system and behind the curtains of fraud detectors. They're hiding in the semis of the semi-automated order management systems and weighing down the camel's back in your risk department. They're raining down all the time.

And the revenue management vendors are responding. There are so many ways today to find lost revenue that the excuses for not picking up the pennies have grown lame. It should no longer be acceptable to claim to be growing so fast you have to stay focused on growth and coverage instead. Besides, that is no longer true in most markets. Emerging markets are showing signs of having learned from the early-growth markets and are taking a more holistic approach to revenue management than their predecessors, but they also have bigger problems to solve. The revenue leakage found in mature markets is a trickle compared to the floods in emerging markets.

But how does anyone know when they have done enough, or at least all they can for now? Well, the TM Forum has been aggressively developing initiatives that could help answer this question. The Forum's revenue management initiative has eight community groups of companies addressing issues and solving problems in asset management, business assurance, charging and billing, customer experience, data analytics, enterprise risk management, fraud management and revenue assurance. And recently, companies have begun certifying their solutions to these problems through the forum's Business Metrics Automation Certification program and comparing themselves to market standards through the Business Benchmarking initiative.

You can read more about this in the January B/OSS Report on Business Assurance, but it looks like we are starting to get a better sense of what the Forum's long-held view of the Lean Operator really means. As it turns out, the Lean Operator has to have a healthy revenue management strategy. And you'll get a sense in that report of what the emerging field of business assurance really means.

E-mail me at tmcelligott@vpico.com or click on the comment button below.