Extending the OSS beyond a customer’s locus of control

While the 20th century was all about centralizing command and control to gain efficiency through vertical integration and mass standardization, 21st century automation is about decentralization – gaining efficiency through horizontal integration of partner ecosystems and mass customization, as in the context-aware cloud where personalized experience across channels is dynamically orchestrated.
The operational challenge of our time is to coordinate these moving parts into coherent and manageable value chains. Instead of building yet another siloed and brittle application stack, the age of distributed computing requires that we re-think business architecture to avoid becoming hopelessly entangled in a “big ball of CRUD”
.”
Dave Duggal
here on TM Forum’s Inform back in May 2016.

We’ve quickly transitioned from a telco services market driven by economies of scale (Dave’s 20th century comparison) to a “market of one” (21st century), where the market wants a personalised experience that seamlessly crosses all channels.

By and large, the OSS world is stuck between the two centuries. Our tools are largely suited to the 20th century model (in some cases, today’s OSS originated in the 20th century after all), but we know we need to get to personalisation at scale and have tried to retrofit them. We haven’t quite made the jump to the model Dave describes yet, although there are positive signs.

It’s interesting. Telcos have the partner ecosystems, but the challenge is that the entire ecosystem still tends to be centrally controlled by the telco. This is the so-called best-of-breed model.

In the truly distributed model Dave talks about, the telcos would get the long tail of innovation / opportunity by extending their value chain beyond their own OSS stack. They could build an ecosystem that includes partners outside their locus of control. Outside their CAPEX budget too, which is the big attraction. They telcos get to own their customers, build products that are attractive to those customers, gain revenues from those products / customers, but not incur the big capital investment of building the entire OSS stack. Their partners build (and share profits from) external components.

It sounds attractive right? As-a-service models are proliferating and some are steadily gaining take-up, but why is it still not happening much yet, relatively speaking? I believe it comes down to control.

Put simply, the telcos don’t yet have the right business architectures to coordinate all the moving parts. From my customer observation at least, there are too many fall-outs as a customer journeys hand off between components within the internally controlled partner ecosystem. This is especially when we talk omni-channel. A fully personalised solution leaves too many integration / data variants to provide complete test coverage. For example, just at the highest level of an architecture, I’ve yet to see a solution that tracks end-to-end customer journeys across all components of the OSS/BSS as well as channels such as online, IVR, apps, etc.

Dave rightly points out that this is the challenge of our times. If we can coherently and confidently manage moving parts across the entire value chain, we have more chance of extending the partner ecosystem beyond the telco’s locus of control.

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