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.