Some telecommunications services and information technology have divided the way their business is accomplish into sections referred to as telecom billing system which stands for support systems and operations support systems. This is to deal with the enormity of the industry, the technical side is one part and the people side, dealing with customers, is the other. The rapidity with which change is introduced and the concomitant customer demand for even better devices make sit a real challenge.
One of the problems is the way customers assume coverage for their devices will be provided. There were several decades between the invention of mobile communication devices and their first introduction while technology solved the problem of coverage. Still today, the complexity of being able to remain in contact every corner on earth, even while on the move, is being perfected.
Producing and servicing a product is only half the battle for any business as identifying and meeting the customer needs and requirements constitute the rest of the challenge. It is a difficult task for managers to keep focused in the middle, balancing the resources and attention each side needs to grow. Most managers grew up with the focus being almost entirely on the customer but an in an IT company, the majority of workers never have anything to do with an external customer.
While a customer focus is natural and necessary, to an extent, IT is an incredibly fast evolving culture that requires inordinate resources devoted to development, layout, preparation and maintenance. Any company that falls behind in this fast paced production marketplace risks becoming obsolete in short order. A rival introducing a popular new gadget can steal market share in an instant, as loyalty to brand names rapidly succumbs to functionality.
The advertising campaign between rival companies trying to get customer attention has smartly focused on the size and complexity of infrastructure development, keeping the impact to the customer at the fore. Whether it is determining how many places one can still be heard or overt declarations of better overall coverage, companies are using telecom billing system to inform customers while competing with their rivals.
On the operational side of this industry, while dealing with the customers make it profitable, systems have continued to evolve at a rapid pace as they have done since the days of party lines when customer data was a manually input process. Today, much of the data from customers is optically read and automatically delivered to the main data base from the field representatives. Everything from addresses to modem serial numbers is collected and maintained by systems that will then prompt other systems in the next sequence of customer set up.
This provides a further concern for each provider in the industry; how to keep track of all of individual parts so they continue to function well together. This easily overwhelms the mind, a program that can take all the data and put in a logical framework is needed as a first step. After that, another program is needed to take the data the first system collated and put it into a format that helps regional managers make sense of the demand, use and popularity of products over geographic areas and time.
Using BSS/OSS to divide and conquer in terms of managing the two gigantic data warehouses that help manage both the technical and human sides of this business will keep a company on top. Trying to muddle through with old methodologies will simply burn out managers and require an ever expanding manpower drain that can not be efficiently fed. Recognizing the need to try something new has always been the mark of an entrepreneur and the IT world is no exception.