Communications Support Systems (CSS)

Have you ever worked in a big telco (or any large organisation for that matter)? Have you ever noticed the disconnection in knowledge / information? On a recent project, I was brought in as an external consultant to find potential improvements to one business unit’s specific key performance indicator (KPI).

As a consultant, my role is a connector – a connector of people, ideas, projects, products, technologies, approaches, etc. On the abovementioned project, I posed questions within the business unit, but also reached out to adjacent units. There were no less than 6 business units that were investigating a particular leading-edge technology that could’ve improved the KPI. Unfortunately, they all only had budget for investigations, with one also having the budget to conduct a very small Proof-of-Concept (PoC). Collectively, they would’ve had the budget to do a fairly significant implementation for all to leverage but separately, none were within 1-2 years of implementation .

I later found out that there was an additional, completely unrelated business unit that had already taken this technology into production with a small trial. It was for a completely different use case but had stood up a product that could’ve been leveraged by the rest.

That got me thinking – the challenge for us in technology is finding a way to remove this waste through “perfect” communication, without bogging us down with information gathering and grooming. Can a conjunct of existing technologies be used, as follows?
Perfect Communication
We already have:

  • Knowledge management systems (KMS) to gather and groom knowledge
  • Chat-bots to collect verbal information and respond with recommendations (more on OSS chat bots tomorrow BTW)
  • Artificial Intelligence (or even just basic analytics tools) to scan data (from KMS, chat-bots, OSS, etc) and provide decision support prompts

We have all the technologies required to significantly augment our current poor communication methods. The question I have for you is do Communications Support Systems (CSS) become an adjunct to OSS or just another IT system that happens to consume OSS data as well as any other sources?

Note: I’ve bracketed “Ambient Listening” in the chat-bot because the six different groups above were all working on research into the cutting-edge technology and talking about it, but there was little in the way of official documentation stored – mostly just emails, communicator conversations, verbal discussions, etc. I do acknowledge the invasion of privacy concerns with this thought experiment though!!  🙂

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