Collaboration Combined With Automation: The Key to CSP Innovation

By Casey Kindiger, generationE Technologies and Resolve Systems

As budgets continue to be tightened and industry growth remains unsteady, how will communication service providers (CSPs) push forward with innovation? What it may come down to is the ability of quad-play providers to free up their most important knowledge workers so that ideas for growth and advancement can take place. And the key to freeing up knowledge-worker resources is automation combined with collaboration.

Take Consolidated Communications as an example. The Illinois-based company has implemented a Wiki-based run book automation (RBA) system that allows knowledge workers to share their critical expertise across the organization. In conjunction with ramping up automation capabilities in the network operations center (NOC), the move has allowed the CSP to save thousands of hours of NOC time each year. With that extra time, who knows what Consolidated’s knowledge workers will accomplish?

Like Consolidated, CSPs today can make use of emerging automation and collaboration practices to not only gain time to work on next-generation projects related to mobility, self-service portals and more, but to also improve process efficiency. And BSS/OSS inefficiencies create tremendous setbacks for CSPs today. Too often these inefficiencies are caused by the underlying vendor systems, and as a result can be fractured across process areas. For example, coordinating remediation steps and diagnostic tests across different engineering teams requires significant manual work outside of the tools that support the process (network monitoring tools, testing tools, workforce management tools, etc.)

When services are fixed and simple (a fixed telephone line), those pockets of inefficiency are small, and manual interactions across systems and between groups do not pose a significant negative impact to operations. However, when services are complex, the pockets of inefficiency become substantial constraints on business efficiency. The potential for automation of OSS processes therefore represents a breakthrough in efficiency potential, allowing CSPs to compete in an increasingly complex business environment.

The trend toward automation in the NOC is a lot like the growth of the quad-play movement. The market has shown that those CSPs that didn’t start testing new quad-play services and offerings in the early years are still lagging behind the growth curve and missing out on important revenue opportunities to this day.
 
My contention is that the same dynamic holds true for automation and collaboration technologies. Those CSPs who take a wait-and-see approach will ultimately suffer the same fate as the quad-play holdouts — years from now trying to get a handle on the basics, struggling to transform their business models and, perhaps, losing customers to their competitors who jumped in earlier and are light years ahead in terms of streamlining customer service, testing, support and other important fundamentals.

My advice: Move forward. Jump into automation, even if it just means automating one or two labor-intensive processes initially. Then, add improved collaboration into the mix, via Wikis and other tools, and CSPs will find a whole new world of opportunities for advancement at their doorstep. While the changes you make may not create a significant difference over night, you’ll learn along the way, which is far better than trying to play catch up.

Casey Kindiger has more than a decade of experience in advising large organizations in the area of business service management, and more specifically, in aligning IT operations with the needs and priorities of the overarching business. In early 2000, he co-founded generationE Technologies, a glo bal IT solution provider and recognized expert in operations support systems (OSS) and service management for communications service providers. In 2008, generationE acquired Resolve Systems, a Run Book Automation (RBA) software startup.