Guides

• Inventory management — the new essentials 09 October 2003

  The market adjustment that began in 2000 and continues today has rendered traditional attitudes about operational support systems obsolete forevermore. Under the old rules, tactical point solutions were the norm. Operators spent freely on back office solutions that delivered minimal impact to the business, and paid little attention to inventory and its management. No longer, writes Jerry Crook, CEO of Cramer Systems

• Keep a keen eye on the dashboard 09 October 2003

  Your IT people are happy with their OSS — but can they give top management a clear, representative view of how the company is performing and whether it's meeting customer needs. Think of asking for a management dashboard, suggests Alun Lewis

• Measuring the return from mobile OSS 09 October 2003

  CFOs should establish a clear process to measure the return on OSS projects, advises Stuart Cochran, director of Tertio Telecoms

• Amdocs Enabler implementation at excelcom 08 October 2003

  Existing postpaid and prepaid billing systems were replaced with a single system in only three months at an Indonesian mobile service provider

• An OSS leader for the communications industry evolution 08 October 2003

  Some say consolidation's on the way, but MetaSolv is ahead of the game and — after two acquisitions — a list of top-tier clients is proving that it works

• Keeping track of network assets 08 October 2003

  Selecting a modern network and service inventory for end-to-end provisioning is one of the key investment decisions for operators, argues Incatel's Olivier Suard

• Prepaid convergence: increasing payment options 08 October 2003

  Are prepaid customers second-class citizens? They form the majority of customers but operators face challenges in developing them as a revenue base, writes Brian McCann of Portal Software

• Reliability is not enough 08 October 2003

  Hossein Eslambolchi, chief technology officer and chief information officer of AT&T, is throwing out in-house legacy OSS systems by the hundred and replacing them with industry-standard off-the-shelf software. Here he tells Alan Burkitt-Gray how he communicates the benefits to the company's board and investors

• Removing the fat 08 October 2003

  Jeremy Wright of Staffware looks at a process-centric approach to OSS as part of a radical infrastructure transformation

• Saving money with the right systems in place 08 October 2003

  David Bland, finance director at Azure, the telecoms revenue assurance company, outlines the importance of revenue assurance as part of an operator's OSS strategy

• Setting the scene for service management 08 October 2003

  The subscriber has become a customer and if you're delivering a service you need to understand this from the customer's point of view, says independent consultant Tom Forsyth. Customer satisfaction is strongly related to corporate performance

• The challenge of the telecommunications CFO 08 October 2003

  How do you reduce the execution cost and risk with managed services, asks Gary Smith of Amdocs

• Too busy talking to communicate? 08 October 2003

  The network is no longer the engineer's playground and the CFO rules strategic decision making, writes Alun Lewis — but both need to communicate about the benefit of OSS projects

• Will the CFO get it? 08 October 2003

  Financial directors of supermarkets and airlines know about the importance of IT. Now it's time for their opposite numbers in the telecoms industry to learn how OSS is essential not just to their stock price but to their survival. By Alan Burkitt-Gray

• A CFO’s technology checklist for CRM investment 07 October 2003

  Integration with billing and OSS are crucial, but Charles Born of Amdocs lists a total of seven points that a chief financial officer should look for when making strategic decisions about CRM

• Evolving an integrated OSS, the modular way 07 October 2003

  Industry standards are needed when upgrading legacy systems, writes Sebastian Toke-Nichols of Convergys

• It’s service that counts 07 October 2003

  Service quality management needs to be at the heart of OSS as operators move from a network focus to a service focus

• Paybacks and benefits 07 October 2003

  The early adopters of service management systems are already seeing paybacks as they realize the benefits of greater operational efficiency, writes OSS Observer's Patrick Kelly

• Building flexibility into network management 05 October 2003

  Helping a service provider's top — and bottom — line is a key aim of Tom Borowiecki, who heads next-generation network management research at Nortel Networks

• Confidence in wireless data 05 October 2003

  In order to provide the business sector with the confidence to migrate to wireless data services, operators need to manage their wireless networks in a customer-centric manner writes Comnitel's Kieran Moynihan

• Implementing and integrating a service management system 05 October 2003

  Bipin Trehan of Cap Gemini Ernst & Young gives a systems integrator's view of the importance of high quality, personalized services

• More medicine will be needed 04 October 2003

  Introducing our CFO Guide to OSS, Keith Willetts, chairman of the TeleManagement Forum, predicts that the telecoms industry — despite its harsh medicine over the past few years — will have to learn to reinvent itself in order to thrive in the market

• Azure case studies 03 October 2003

• More features...