No telco wants to buy an OSS/BSS

When you’re a senior exec in a telco and you’ve been made responsible for allocating resources, it’s unlikely that you ever think, “gee, we really should give our operations teams some new operations systems (OSS/BSS) to work with.”

It would be nice if they did, but that’s just not what they’re thinking about. For the senior leaders of most telcos, back-office operations are generally seen as a necessary evil, a cost centre, and should therefore be reduced to the minimum possible (or perhaps even less if I’m being slightly cynical??). They don’t want the tools, they want the outcomes.

The problem we face is tied to the “O” in OSS/BSS. We use OSS/BSS to solve operations problems.

People do not spend big money on “small” problems.

I’m not suggesting that operations problems are small, but senior sponsors have bigger problems to solve with their available budget than just operations problems. They have broader problems spread across the entire “business model” such as:

• Identifying, enticing and onboarding new customers
• Increasing revenues and ensuring reliable revenue collections to gather all-important cash-flow. Also ensuring minimisation of costs. Both of these sides of the finance equation enhance financial performance of the company
• Enhancing the value proposition and brand value through the creation of compelling, reasonably priced products and offers
• Differentiating their company and products in competitive and/or saturated markets
• Ensuring the most optimal customer service is provided against the trade-off of cost to serve
• Managing risks such as sub-optimal network health / capacity / availability / obsolescence to ensure existing customers stay on as customers (ie reducing customer churn)
• Ensuring all available resources (capital, human, technical, etc) are allocated effectively to optimise resource and financial performance

The diagram below attempts to break these problem categories down further in the form of a business model map.

Do you notice something about this diagram and all the bullet-points?

OSS/BSS solutions either do, or could, help to solve all of these problems. OSS/BSS can help solve problems across almost all elements of the telco business model. We just haven’t done a very good job of making everyone aware of this yet.

If we want OSS/BSS to receive big money (investment), we have to better highlight the bigger problems they solve.

You may’ve already seen the following chart in past articles. It helps to show that OSS/BSS are the profit engine for most telcos, not cost centres. When done well, OSS/BSS can supercharge a differentiated telco business model. When done poorly, they can hand the advantage over to competitors.

If you need help generating a business case that is big enough to warrant big OSS investment, leave us a note and we’d be delighted to have a chat about your specific situation.