CEO Material

As I am easily given to flights of fancy and irrational behavior, this post is probably not a good idea. The proof is in some of the comments I have received at various stages of my life.


My kindergarten teacher noted: His mind is everywhere except where it is needed most – class. He demonstrates a vicious lack of respect for pets and will most likely receive Hall of Infamy award from the SPCA. Should he choose to become a vet, it is advisable that the police keep close tabs on him.

In High School the headmaster wrote: This boy has the potential to become great. Unfortunately, he is working extremely hard to make sure that his potential remains untapped. So far, he has remarkably done well on this front.

In College, the dean noted (after I made it to the Dean’s List for superior academic performance during the same semester when I was kicked out for cohabiting): As a devotee of hedonistic pursuits, his performance, whereas impressive, is quite anomalous given his infinite affinity to mischief, continual lack of focus and a generally lackadaisical attitude.

Having read an article by Tony Poulos, “C U in the C-Suite”, I commented that for a CSP, a good Head of RA is candidate for CEO. Let us for one moment assume that I haven’t gone bonkers and consider the idea, if for no other reason because every mad man deserves clinical diagnosis and access to decent medicare…

- Who has seen company performance affected by process gaps and organizational issues?

- Who knows that the CCO, CTO and the CIO are running functions that work mostly at cross-purposes and lead to poor company performance?

- Who has seen the company lose money because of the airheads in Marketing and the sloppy engineers?

- Who has seen CRM systems rolled out at great cost only to deliver marginal benefits?

- Who has seen signed-off agreements that do everything except benefit the CSP?

- Who has seen unnecessary costs being incurred for SIM card costs, excess leased lines and unnecessary radio spectrum?

- Who has had to suffer, patiently I might add, heads of functions who suffer from acute cases of myopia, lack of business appreciation and a penchant for bickering – all this so that a process can be improved to avert leakage or in order to recover revenue?

- Who knows better the people that need to be fired and the signs of an area where somebody needs to be bulleted?

- Who knows, first hand, the effect of unmanaged regulatory pressure on revenues and costs?

- Who has seen company strategy and targets being made in absolute disregard of statistics and the resulting mess?

- Who has seen products rolled out in a manner that ensures the CSP, the customer and the regulator are all fighting?

- Who has served as friend to the oppressed, an enemy to the oppressor yet a faithful colleague to both?



Answer: Head of Revenue Assurance

I say anoint him. Crown him.

2011 - what yours truly predicts

Since everybody is making all manner of predictions with regard to 2011, I have decided to make a few of my own. I must confess making predictions is a very fulfilling exercise and gives one an air of importance that can only be achieved by sleeping in a three-piece suit and a bowler hat.

So here goes...

1. Cloud computing will continue to be big. In the midst of billowing smoke, lightning, thunder and clouds will emerge a new breed of consultants, sharper than the sword and vicious like sharks. They will come up with new terminologies and they will sell big. The only thing bigger than their mouths will be their invoices.


2. SaaS for RA may yet find its place.

3. New concepts, mostly offshoots of what we already know will come up.

4. With regard to (3) above, Rob Mattison will keep on evolving. GRAPA will have a course on revenue assurance for cloud services and effective prevention of information leakage based on a case-study of the US embassies wiki-leaks debacle. Courses will be offered in Capetown and Dubai and Kuala Lumpur and Abuja and Glasgow..and your town.

5. Conferences at exotic venues will happen. A lot. Many keynote speakers will also make their dollar, while gaining lots of frequent flier miles.

6. Big4 firms will continue to issue flashy reports containing lots of insights (ahem, what we already know will be restated in very verbose terms and possibly a new font-type and pie-charts that remind one of pizza will be invented so that the reports can look new and improved). The old fashioned way of walking down to the Ops team and the Marketing to ferret out issues of leakage will triumph over these reports. RA fraternity is hereby reminded that it is however advisable to keep a sleep-inducing copy of a Big4 report by the bedside for those nights when insomnia strikes.

7. Vendors will issue new software versions. Mergers and acquisitions will happen and each RA vendor will be the “leading revenue assurance solutions provider, consistently and demonstrably offering innovative solutions to tackle any past, present and future leakages as well as foreseeable and any imaginable RA problems”.

8. The classic RA problems will remain. If for no other reason, because human beings will still make mistakes and the best laid plans will still be subject to Murphy’s laws. Like it or not, we are here because of a simple fact: human beings infinite ability to screw up anything. And I guarantee that 2011 will have enough screw-ups to warrant RA.

Open Source RA Initiative at talkRA

A recent debate on talkRA turned to open Source Tools for RA. Check this thread.

I must confess I had to read up on Open Source Software as I have never really bothered to find out how it works.

Why would an initiative to create an open source RA Tool work? What would be required for it?

I liked the principles of OSS set out at this page and I think if the initiative to develop an open source tool follows them, it would have a good chance of succeeding.

Free Redistribution: No restrictions with regard to selling or giving away the software as a component of an aggregate software distribution containing programs from several different sources. No requirements for a royalty or other fee for such sale. This is the heart of the matter.

Source Code: Include source code and allow distribution in source code as well as compiled form. Deliberately obfuscated source code is not allowed. This is the heart of the heart of the heart of the matter.

Derived Works: Must allow modifications and derived works. This is the heart of the heart of the heart of the heart of the heart of the matter. OK, enough with the hearts.

Integrity of the Author's Source Code: The license may restrict source-code from being distributed in modified form only if the license allows the distribution of "patch files" with the source code for the purpose of modifying the program at build time.

No Discrimination against Persons or Groups: The license must not discriminate against any person or group of persons. Even Rob Mattison should be free to use it or participate in its development, even if he will, in due course, start his own OSS initiative and call it Global Revenue Open Source System (GROSS) and you will not be allowed to participate in it in case you are participating in another OSS initiative!

No Discrimination against Fields of Endeavor: The license must not restrict anyone from making use of the program in a specific field of endeavor. It should be open for use not just in telco revenue assurance, insurance, banking, utilities...heck, if you can find a way to make pizza with the system, feel free.

Distribution of License: The rights attached to the program must apply to all to whom the program is redistributed. Hence no need for execution of an additional license by those parties.

License Must Not Be Specific to a Product: The rights attached to the program must not depend on the program's being part of a particular software distribution. Micro$oft bundling tactics (or variations of the same) are not welcome here.

License Must Not Restrict Other Software: Take note, BILL GAT€$.

License Must Be Technology-Neutral: No provision of the license may be predicated on any individual technology or style of interface. Oh, so you like Oracle and hate MS-SQL (like me). Keep it to yourself.

Would RA tool vendors support such an initiative? Are RA managers generally accustomed to “mainstream” tools provided by established players and what would it take for them to shift their mindset? Have we built a community of masochists who are used to paying an arm and a leg to put in place proprietary systems that may be rendered obsolete even before we commission them, not because vendors are bandits but because we are all in free-fall? Probably RA people’s mindset is not fixed – one of the qualities of a good RA manager is being open-minded, judiciously applying the correct and cost-effective tool or procedure to achieve maximum impact.

I will not pretend I have all the answers to this but one answer I know: the answer is out there, with all the people doing good work in RA community. Even more answers will come from work done by researchers like Güera Romo, industry commentators like Tony Poulos and Eric Priezkalns. Hecklers like me also have an important role to play.

The bulk of the answers, I suspect,  will come from that guy struggling with unbilled usage, all manner of fraud, stolen recharge-vouchers, corrupted switch records, a mediation system that works today and goes on holiday tomorrow, a telco industry in frenzied innovation mode. In the final analysis, he wants a solution that is adaptive to situations, easy to deploy and configure. This man on the street is really a VIP in the case of open source. Will the open source tool be the panacea to all RA problems? No. In my view, it should not even attempt to do so. But it may just provide cost-effective, agile, realistic and usable tools whose design and development runs true to the concept of 1+1=3.

UPDATE:

I have just revisited talkRA and already there is a work-space to host the Open Source Revenue Assurance! Get the word out. And bring your ideas to the table.

Somebody must take the fall

Having reached the unfortunate realization that the President will not respond to me anytime soon, I have given some thought to this whole state of affairs and decided I must blame somebody. Yes, somebody must take the fall. For the countless CSPs who are running Revenue Assurance operations yet they have no way to tell who is a professional and who is not, somebody must be blamed. I have thus assembled this set of ramblings with the overall goal of blaming somebody.

Who is at fault really? Not GRAPA. Not TMF.

It is you and me. When we take things at face-value, we further let the likes of GRAPA molest revenue assurance. The result- confusion, people holding certificates which are not worth the paper they are printed on, RA recruitment headache at CSPs, the growth of the common body of knowledge hampered because we are all pulling in different directions, RA world risking a perpetual state of mumbo-jumbo with terms such as revenue engineering, xtreme revenue assurance, hard-core revenue assurance...gumboot and mackintosh revenue assurance (?)

Let us assume a staff-party setting, by way of illustration. My simplistic expectation of a revenue assurance practitioner is that such a person should be the one who, when everybody is saying the staff party is great, this person asks:

“Where is the fire exit in this place... and does that fire-extinguisher work... and how come we only have a water-based fire extinguisher and... when was the last time it was tested if it ever was?”

“How do we know that behind that fire exit, we won’t find the neighbour built a permanent wall?”

“How was this food prepared and how do we know this is all the food that was prepared?”

“Is everybody in this party supposed to be here and are there people who should be here but they are not?”

“When we paid the caterer, is that the much we should have paid?”

Such a guy is not really popular, not because he is a jack-ass who spoils the party, but mostly because he has taken the unpopular position of asking what we all wish to sweep under the carpet. The rest of us have more or less outsourced the hard questions to him. They say risk and opportunity are two sides of the same coin but guess which side most of us want to look at? He should however not limit himself to questions –asking questions is easy- he needs to be a trusted advisor, counsel to the business, the one who assists the business in the quest to find answers by shining light on the path and also supports the implementation of such answers. He holds the unenviable dual role of being the in-house-sage and the irritant-at-large. Bear in mind that my view is of course biased and possibly very narrow as I have only worked in revenue assurance at one CSP but I have had the good fortune of hearing my CEO once endorse the revenue assurance team saying:

“Mr. X here is the Chief Commercial Officer. I know he sometimes feeds me bullshit, because he is a salesman. And so does Mr. Y, the CTO, he can afford to clothe the bullshit in technical jargon. But when you guys [Revenue Assurance], tell me something, I have no qualms about it. You simply can’t afford BS.”

Truth be told, the CEO went ahead to lambast us for having issued a report that was not accurate, but I like to think that the compliment was implicitly stated in the expectation. X and Y were also in the meeting. They looked on gravely, their faces with what I guess one can call cadaveric composure. Priceless.

If CEOs and senior management are to place confidence in RA, shouldn’t the staff in such a team be professionals of some sort? Certainly, the RA guy needs to have a certain level of technical aptitude and competencies. At the WeDo User group meeting of May 2010, Eric Priezkalns, I think, mentioned that the basis of a profession is (like it or not), exclusion. I will attempt to paraphrase him. Being members of a certain profession, we are really saying, these guys have met the standard hence they are professionals in this area. And the rest have not. That is why these ones are professionals and the rest of the crowd is not. That is why, no matter how many Wikipedia entries on medical science I may read, no matter how many in-house practice sessions of first-aid I carry out and even if took to donning a starched white coat, I will never really be a doctor. I would have to go through a learning process, an accreditation process and a practice process, governed by a certain code. You simply cannot doctor your way to becoming a doctor. Well, you could try, but then you will have the dubious distinction of being known as a quack which is not exactly a synonym for doctor. As an aside, I liked this description of a quack: Quacks (also known as "crackpots" or "cranks") want only to talk and not to listen. They are paranoids with delusions of grandeur: Their theory could never be wrong; therefore everyone else's must be. I know someone who is like that. No prizes for guessing.

The Wikipedia entry for profession (with all the points of correction) is still quite a good attempt at defining what constitutes a profession: A profession arises when any trade or occupation transforms itself through "the development of formal qualifications based upon education, apprenticeship, and examinations, the emergence of regulatory bodies with powers to admit and discipline members, and some degree of monopoly rights."

If that be the expectation, how close are we to actualizing the dream of RA as a profession?

Now, having blamed somebody, I am OK.

Next up: somebody needs to take the fall for global warming. I think Tony Blair or George Bush will do for this one.

A Tale of Tools

I was recently part of an eminent panel of evaluators that was looking at various RA tools. [I am important, after all. In Africa, there is a saying that if a child washes his hands, he can eat with kings]. The exercise entailed going through vendor responses on hard-copy and soft-copy. I hasten to add that this is not a task I would wish upon my worst enemy, but endless cups of gourmet coffee made it bearable. Everything was fine until it became clear (from some of the questions being asked around the room) that different people (drawn from Procurement, IT and Finance) had either very little knowledge of what we were looking for (hence very little clue as to some of the key functionalities that the system should deliver or they had other things to handle hence as much as they were busy on their laptops, they were doing other office work. However, I noticed people suddenly lightened up when the subject of site-visits came up. Globe trotting is attractive :)

Two problems:

i) An evaluation panel for a multi-million dollar system yet some of the members of the panel are unclear on what they are looking for, mostly because they either lack the theoretical and practical background in RA and Fraud Management but even when they have this background, there is lack of clarity on the strategy being pursued by the RAFM team.

ii) A busy team which views the selection of the tool as just another to-do.

Two risks:

i) CSP could end up with a system that nobody wants, nobody understands and nobody knows what went wrong. Blame-game ensues between vendor and CSP. Vendor thinks he delivered what the CSP wanted.CSP thinks vendor did not deliver what he wanted. Vendor wonders if CSP really knew what he wanted. CSP thinks vendor is over-rated and a hawker of BS. (Suddenly the hero of the moment, in complete disregard of the motto: pat-a-pet, draws a gun and shoots both vendor and CSP, sparing the rest of us the agony of seeing two wet dogs chasing their tails on the dinner table?)

ii) Arising from the above, millions of dollars down the drain in the form of CAPEX and OPEX, revenue leakages and frauds are still happening. Not to mention the two wet carcasses that we now need to furtively dispose of and the risk of having to answer annoying queries from the Society for the Protection and Care of Animals.

TMF's GB941 Revenue Assurance RFx Guidelines has some gems three of which I found worth rehashing. CSPs should especially go through this document before engaging in procurement of RA tools. Basically, there are some things that one should be looking for:

Phased Solution: Aim for a nicely comprehensive solution but be realistic that you won't achieve all at one go. If you promised the CEO complete RA automation in the next 2 months, good luck to you.  It won't happen.

Solution Description: rather than a product description, what solutions are we seeking? This is critical. Vendors employ good marketers. If you don’t know what you want, i.e. the solution that you are seeking, then you will be lost in the bells and whistles (great sounding features which may be good for another CSP but not appropriate in your case)

Growth Potential: need to be clear on transitions between the defined project phases, evolution to reflect changes in the operator's circumstances and maturity enhancement. Consider how the tool is supposed to help your RA team move up the maturity levels. With regard to revenue assurance strategy, the solution obtained must fit in and support it.

Is it any wonder that the 2009 KPMG survey on revenue assurance found that a significant number of CSPs are unhappy with their RA tools? The report states that approximately 43% of RA heads and senior management indicated they were either only partially satisfied or were not satisfied with the application of RA tools. Granted, every report from Big4 needs to be read with a BIG question mark but that is a topic for another day. Maybe they should have asked how many of the RA heads and senior management had been on a site-visit to evaluate a system in the last 3-years…I am sure the figure would be >43%:)

The Injustice of Misplaced Justice

Several weeks ago, I was in a supermarket and purchased a few items. When it came to change, the cashier had no coins. So what does she do? Without apology, she gave me 4 sweets (as a substitute for my 4 shillings). This kind of bartering takes place all the time in this country – some supermarkets even have a sign at the cashier’s point boldly asking customers to accept sweets as there is a shortage of coins. The shopper does not have to wait a long time as coins are being sought. The supermarket swiftly moves on to the next customer. But I thought, hang on a minute. Who is getting the short end of the stick here? I never wanted sweets in the first place. Yet, this is not bad enough when you consider the next set of facts. The following weekend I went back to the same supermarket and looked up the prices of sweets, precisely a packet of 100 sweets, the same brand. Well, it appears a pack of 100 sweets costs 40 shillings, making the unit price about 0.4 shillings. Quite unfairly, the cashier gave me a sweet for a shilling meaning I paid 150% more. So, not only do I have to take the sweets that I never wanted in the first place, but I have to take them at a price that is just scandalous! At a time of deep-recession-economy like this, such is the kind of stuff that makes my blood boil. Heck, the government had to change the way the Central Bureau of Statistics calculates inflation so that the figures can look less scary.

My beloved country is not known for consumer rights protection so I don’t think I will get justice any time soon. My recourse is to shop using Visa debit card (!), even for items of as low as 10 shillings. I think this option makes the supermarket pay a service charge to Visa and that is somewhat gratifying. However, it means I will have to spend some extra 5 minutes waiting as the cashier swipes my card over and over because of time-out errors arising from the fact that the GPRS connection for the PDQs is provided by the CSP which I work for and we are not known for reliable data connections. It is Africa after all, reliable data services equate to a luxury. The other risk is: my card may very well be cloned while I am at it. A friend of mine once swiped his card in Nigeria and later started noticing dodgy transactions on his bank statement. When he mentioned to us that he had recently been to Abuja, suddenly the dots connected.

Let’s think of some of the ways that CSPs also rob customers in exercises that are meant to make the customer’s life easier, or to correct mistakes made by the CSP.

We once had a customer whose data bundle balance was deleted. He noticed and promptly complained. He only noticed because he had been charged out-of-bundle fees and thought this cannot be right. So, he demanded proof of data sessions and volumes and it turned out his suspicions were right. In our wisdom, we refunded the bytes. We also credited back the number of bytes that had been charged out of bundle. Nobody thought about the fact that the important thing was not just the number of out-of-bundle bytes but the per unit rate at which the customer’s account had been charged i.e. his first complaint is that 50MB were deleted thus clearing his data bundle as a result of which he surfed 25MB out of bundle charged at 8 shillings per MB hence accruing a charge of 100 shillings. If he had been surfing within bundle (as he should have), the per unit rate would be 3 shillings. Quite elementary, you would think. Giving him back 75MB is simply not justice. Perhaps somebody thought the customer wouldn’t notice.

But notice he did. And complained to high-heavens, story was all over the dailies. We were “saved” by the same thing that I am now complaining about – my country is not known for consumer rights protection.

Eventually, we did refund correctly. But the customer’s faith in us, if he ever had any, was gone. Can a refund ever make up for the inconvenience?

All is Bad that Starts Badly

We were urgently summoned - Marketing wanted the product launched as soon as possible
Which product, we asked? Billing team thought the billing was not easily configurable
Where is the business case? Finance said the revenue must be reportable
Does it work? Customer Care insisted the customers must be comfortable

So we asked - can the stakeholder departments sign off on the product launch document?
Marketing became vehement
The customers are baying for the product, or they will churn
And if they do, we all burn
Pray, where is the business rules document, queried Revenue Assurance
So that we may be sure, and not leave anything to chance

Launch, we must. So said Marketing.


So we launched the product and placed the advert on centre-pages
The customers whooped with delight …And now there are revenue leakages
Revenue figures are not correct, insists Finance
Customers are complaining bitterly, so brief was the romance

The CEO says Revenue Assurance Team was too feeble
But…Marketing wanted the product launched as soon as possible