| After the
horrors visited upon us on September 11, we may feel torn between the need
to get back to business, and the need to assimilate our new experience, an
experience so disturbing that we grope for ways to make sense of it, and
to integrate it into our daily lives. Somehow, business as usual
doesnt seem as self-evidently meaningful, not if it doesnt relate in
some way to larger events. As the editorial director of this magazine, I
keep thinking of how I might relate this magazines preoccupation with
communications solutions, a subject which now seems so mundane, to the
larger events taking place all around us. I do so while being aware of the
risks. If I were to conflate issues of national security and business
communications technology, as though each subject were equally grave and
urgent, I could sound as though I lacked all sense of proportion. If I
were to claim recent events demonstrated that communications solutions
were now more relevant than ever, I could sound opportunistic or
self-serving. But such claims are not at all what I have in mind. Indeed,
I have no new message or positioning. I do not claim that any existing
message has assumed any new importance. Rather, if there is a new message,
it is one that should be heeded, as opposed to promulgated, by those who
would advocate innovative communications solutions.
INITIAL RESPONSE
To describe this message, I will have to begin by speaking in very
general terms. But first, I should at least quickly note that there are a
few application areas that really have assumed a higher profile, at least
temporarily. These application areas include security, disaster recovery,
and audio and video conferencing. Security and disaster recovery are so
directly relevant that they need no justification here. Audio and video
conferencing, however, have inspired a lot of speculation of late. Some
would say that audio and video conferencing suggest themselves as
alternatives to travel, which may become less attractive if it is
perceived as being riskier or less convenient. At least this is the claim
being forwarded by many of the vendors. Ive even seen one vendor (who
shall remain nameless) claim that video conferencing should be more widely
deployed because it saves lives. A hard sell. Perhaps it would
suffice to say that it appears video conferencing will attract some extra
attention just when it is experiencing a significant transition, from
ISDN-based systems largely limited to conference rooms, to IP-based
systems that may accommodate a wider array of end points, as well as more
sophisticated collaboration and document sharing capabilities. Whether
there really is heightened interest in video conferencing, or whether any
heightened interest will persist, or whether the claims made on behalf of
video conferencing represent so much wishful thinking, well, time will
tell. (In any event, if the success of video conferencing were to depend
on a permanently depressed airline industry, we might well wonder if the
success of video conferencing were something to hope for.)
So much for the applications with obvious relevance to current events.
What of communications solutions in general? Might communications
solutions resonate with attitudes provoked by newly appreciated threats?
That is, might communications solutions be inspired by the responses to
these threats?
BEYOND FEAR
We could say that it is the fear and uncertainty inspired by terrorist
attacks that has accounted for the interest in security, disaster
recovery, and video conferencing. But there are also more positive
emotions in the air. Many of us were moved by the courage of firefighters,
police, and healthcare workers; the generosity of the volunteers involved
in the cleanup and recovery operations; and the dignified leadership of
public officials. Many of us turned to the government for reassurance that
intelligence operations and defense measures would prove effective and
afford protection. Suddenly, we saw an emphasis on collective,
cooperative, collaborative effort. And even relief and gratitude for the
dedication behind such effort. And perhaps even recognition that such
dedication is never coerced or extracted, nor can it be. Rather, such
dedication is always there, only that it sometimes escapes our notice,
except when it is most obvious, in times of dire emergency.
Such public spiritedness is something new, or at least it seems new,
given that for many years now the hard-bitten, competitive private sector
has dominated our imaginations. Here, if the commonweal was considered at
all, it was in the sense that if one did good, one did so by doing well,
by focusing on individual achievement. And so dot-com millionaires were
celebrated on magazine covers, and asocial techies were lionized despite
their sometimes peculiar world views, their seeming impatience to shed the
limitations of the human condition. And few were more ardent in their
insistence on severely limited government and social services, since they
typically deemed the public sector hopelessly inept, incapable of doing
anything right, and bound to worsen any problem with which it concerned
itself.
Such excesses, however, may have already been on the wane, even before
the events of September 11. Appreciation for the economic wonders of
technology had already become less indiscriminate, as demonstrated by
squintier valuations from Wall Street. Going forward, considering the
prospects for communications solutions, what will be valued most highly?
One possibility is that investors, subscribers, and customers will value
those companies, products, and services that emulate the best attributes
demonstrated in the public sector. For example, the public sector is never
more appreciated than when it demonstrates responsiveness and
accountability. If the economy falters badly enough, business looks for
stimulus packages or outright bailouts. If theres an accident, we
expect an ambulance. When we age, joining an ever more demographically
significant portion of the population, we may become more conservative
about social security, and less enamored of privatization schemes.
For our public institutions, immediate concerns include coordinated
intelligence information and effective logistics, that is, the ability to
draw materials from a relatively stable back end to support relatively
dynamic operations on the front lines, wherever those front lines might
happen to be. Such concerns are also evident in the private sector, in
communications solutions. Here, we also see a preoccupation with
integrating back office and front office or customer-facing operations.
This preoccupation, when it comes to the provisioning of communications
services, might inspire service providers to open up provisioning to the
subscribers themselves, that is, to implement self-service provisioning.
Similarly, the negotiation and enforcement of service level agreements
might involve less of an inward focus on the part of service providers,
who to date have implemented monitoring more in terms of an engineers
appreciation of network capacities, and less in terms of a customers
experience of service quality. And, finally, we have what may be the most
obvious example of front office/back office integration. We have the
integration of enterprise resource planning (ERP) and customer
relationship management (CRM). Such integration is largely about
coordinated intelligence, the better to implement analytics, customer
segmentation, and the ability to seize every available business
opportunity, be it an upsell or cross-sell opportunity, or the timely
offer of an inducement to buy, or the issuance of an appropriately subtle
(or blunt) reminder or call to action.
SELF-SERVICE PROVISIONING
Front office/back office integration is a theme sounded by TeleGea,
which recently announced a platform designed to help customers purchase
and manage communications services and products via the Internet. The
platform, a software named Emporium Enterprise, offers technology which
promises to leverage communications service providers (CSPs) existing
back office systems to create Web-based, self-service environments for
their subscribers and partners.
According to Sanjay Mewada, director of the Telecom E-Business Services
Practice at The Yankee Group, such self-service platforms could help CSPs
address significant business challenges. CSPs are under tremendous
pressure to grow revenue, limit customer churn, and operate more
efficiently and effectively. As more and more telecom purchasing moves
online, self-care and online support are quickly becoming differentiating
factors in the selection of a service provider, said Mewada
Emporium Enterprises architecture is XML-based and J2EE-compliant,
and features a unique adaptor framework that integrates with existing
back-office and middleware systems (for example, order handling, customer
management, invoicing, problem resolution, and service planning) to
improve processes and leverage existing systems. According to TeleGea,
Emporium Enterprise is unique in its ability to seamlessly extend its
functionality to CSPs agent and reseller network. The company also cites
the general benefits of improved customer service, faster creation and
deployment of new services, reduced service delivery costs, and faster
time-to-revenue.
Emporium Enterprise supports a broad range of communications products
and services (for example, voice, data, wireless, and IP) via multiple
access media, including HTML, WML, XML, and vXML. Businesses can manage
all aspects of accounts via a single interface, including ordering new
products and services; adding, activating, changing or canceling services;
as well as reviewing orders, purchases, and account activity.
SERVICE LEVEL ASSURANCE
Another dimension of front office/back office integration is change
management. Explaining the importance of change management to service
providers, Tere Bracco, a senior analyst for Current Analysis, notes that
with change scenarios such as device failures, adding new equipment,
customers upgrading or leaving, deploying new services, and the inevitable
network breakdowns, the ability to keep up and manage it all is vital to
carriers, especially as they offer advanced SLAs, service guarantees, and
customer facing reports as unique service and product differentiators.
Change management has figured in recent announcements from Quallaby, a
company specializing in carrier-class network monitoring and service
assurance software. Quallaby explicitly refers to change management
features in its flagship product, called PROVISO. According to the
company, PROVISO is designed to allow service providers to maintain data
integrity throughout their networks despite continual change, thanks to
the addition of new features providing the ability to automatically track,
report on, and manage device and subscriber changes.
The technology behind PROVISOs change management permits network
changes to be automatically synchronized to multiple levels of the network
inventory, polling, collection, grouping, reporting minimizing
errors from manual management methods. According to Quallaby, better
change management enables better revenue generation capabilities through
the immediate availability of accurate SLA reports, and providing reliable
information to make better business decisions regarding customer care, SLA
credits, up-selling, and service creation.
ERP REACHES OUT TO CRM
Over the past couple of years, ERP vendors have attempted to augment
their back office expertise with front office capabilities, namely CRM.
Some ERP vendors, such as PeopleSoft, have embraced CRM by way of
acquisition. Others, such as SAP, have done so by way of internal
development. In either case, the ideal is to automate related business
processes from end to end, from customer-facing operations such as sales,
marketing, and channel management, to operations focused on optimizing the
supply chain, through activities such as billing, inventory, finance, and
human resources. Basically, ERP/CRM integration would relate logistically
oriented processes, managed by relatively rigid business rules to achieve
stability and efficiency, with applications designed to accommodate
sometimes fickle customer preferences and speedy transactions.
In a recent announcement, SAP indicated that the latest version of its
mySAP Customer Relationship Management could not only provide a range of
CRM functionality, it could also serve as a platform to openly integrate
with either SAP or non-SAP business applications such as supply chain
management, product lifecycle management, and human lifecycle management.
With respect to the demand chain, the solutions key customer
interaction areas including marketing, analytics, field sales, telesales,
key account management, channel management, field service, customer
service, e-selling, Internet self-service, Internet sales, and the
interaction center. With respect to the supply chain, the solution
encompasses the integration of the logistics and workforce management
functions to provide enhanced closed-loop service processes. This
combination of front office and back office functionality is intended to
empower service personnel by providing them with all the information they
need to provide the right service to the right customer at the right time.
CONCLUSION
The integration of back office and front office functionality, whether
in the context of network management or customer interaction management,
may be likened to the coordination of logistical activities, wherein
industrial capacities may be brought to bear in the front lines.
Alternatively, such integration could be likened to the coordination that
may take place among disparate services to improve intelligence gathering
and analysis. Granted, it would be easy to overwork the analogy. However,
if the analogy is at all apt, it would suggest that back office/front
office integration, whether it is achieved by businesses or by public
institutions, demands extraordinary commitment and a shared sense of
purpose if it is to succeed.
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