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.