Network-centric BSS is no longer valid

When telco profits derive from voice, text and data, a network-centric business support system (BSS) is quite useful, as the business/service being supported is the network itself. But in the digital economy, the most appealing services are from the Internet world, and includinge microblogging, streaming video, gaming, and instant messaging, among many others. We expand network capacity and evolve to LTE largely to improve the quality of these services, with BSS still largely supporting the network, not the services.

CSPs are struggling to adapt through either cooperation or competition with the over-the-top (OTT) players, but they have thus far been the followers, and this is reflected in the icons seen on any smart device, where the operator’s are often relegated to the folder that the media dubs bloatware. A network-centric BSS is of limited usefulness here.

In the halcyon days of mobile telco, network deployment speed translated to more subscribers and more revenue, so it was considered preferable to simply build a new BSS or a new charging system to accommodate a new technology/business rather than spend months or even years modifying the legacy gear. This leads to a tangled mess that could be called “business service spaghetti.” Business flexibility is hampered because of a complex and heavily customized BSS, while time to market (TTM) for new services usually takes weeks or even months, as opposed to the days or hours of the Internet world.

From BSS to BES

Most of the services being churned out today are long-tailed and flame out quickly, making them ill-suited to siloed management. A new philosophy of enablement is needed, suitable for an ecosystem where innovation could come from anywhere, and this is why the business support system must evolve into the business enablement suite (BES).

A BES would be something completely new to the telecom industry, but it’s not difficult to find precedents in cyberspace. Internet players are good at building an open ecosystem (over a service platform) that attracts as many partners as possible in order to deliver the best service experience to end users, often monetizing it after the fact through reverse charging, freemium services, etc. Empowered by this openness, and other elements, every partner can run and manage their business/service autonomously. Amazon and its ilk are good examples of here. People often say, “I bought this from Amazon,” but if you look carefully at the transaction details or at your credit card bill, you will notice that the party that you do business with is often not Amazon itself but a third-party retailer; in this case, Amazon itself just provides the platform, much as a telco would provide infrastructure or billing. Amazon’s BES also encompasses other elements, such as renting out storage to SMEs. BES: A neurodynamic tree

BES, as a concept new to telco that will serve vastly different business functions depending on an operator’s comfort zone, can be thought of as a “neurodynamic tree,” as opposed to traditional BSS, which grows more like an ordinary tree.

As an ordinary tree grows, the side that faces the sun (the north or south side, depending on your hemisphere) grows more robustly, with the shape of the tree itself gradually changing over a matter of months, much like the response time of a traditional BSS to the business environment.

But in the digital economy, circumstances change quickly, and an ordinary tree cannot flourish under such conditions. A new kind of tree is needed, one that is aware of its environment and can react promptly – a neurodynamic tree.

With the neurodynamic structure of a BES tree, each of its many leaves acts as a customer touch point, and could be used for query, subscription, billing, payment, delivery, or catalog purposes, among others, and is equipped with the necessary skills, information, knowledge, and tools to instantaneously respond to changes in the surrounds, just like how a nerve detects a hot stove and tells the hand to pull away, all without instructions from the brain. A good example here is a retail channel, which is capable of defining flexible business rules on its own. When a customer accesses this channel, the context (location) is obtained and the customer’s preferences (indicated by dozens or hundreds of tags) are matched against these predefined business rules. After matching, a comprehensive set of actions such as promotion, billing, notification, and advertising can be triggered instantly in a user-friendly manner.

Within this neurodynamic tree, each leaf acts autonomously, as does the tree itself, with big data acting as the soil that nourishes it. As the ecosystem grows more robust, more of these trees can thrive, with each leaf receiving the nutrients (customer insights broken down from big data) it needs on demand.

Key attributes of BES

There are four key features that make the neurodynamic structure of BES what it is.

Experience on demand

The selection of goods online, and the information about them, is virtually limitless. Both of these trends make customers more demanding. A premium experience is critical to both converting and retaining a prospect, and it should last throughout the entire purchase and consumption lifecycle. Thanks to the seamless collaboration of online & offline channels, as well as synergy between IT and communication networks, the boundaries between digital goods, physical goods and communication services are blurring. Goods and services should be tailored to the customer (through configuration) and delivered on demand without waiting, in a well-advised and well-informed fashion.

Business agility

CSPs typically provide all services themselves, monopolizing the entire lifecycle; with agility in this case relating to internal operations such as price configuration, business process orchestration, and bill formatting. In the digital economy, if CSPs want to move beyond dumb pipe services, they need to aggressively partner with retail channels, virtual network providers, service providers, and vertical industry partners, and this means no more monopolies. Instead, they must enable their partners to work autonomously, defining their own business rules and orchestrating their own business processes, with the entire process as automated and simplified as possible, so that efficiency and a better user experience are assured.

Cultivating innovation

Any BES will act as a business enabler for building an entire ecosystem. Its success depends largely on how many partners are attracted and how many business opportunities are created. A BES will be open as it will provide internal capabilities to all partners through standardized interfaces, while allowing a certain level of sharing among partners in accordance with in-place agreements. It will also consist of lightweight modules, that can be tailored to support a variety of business models.

Data-driven value realization

Big data is still largely an unexploited resource in the telco industry, but this has to change as this data will prove the soil through which any operator’s neurodynamic tree will thrive. Although big data is less exploited in the telecom industry than in the Internet world, telco has the advantage as data from networks, services, and the Internet can all be combined to better the customer experience and create more opportunities.

How BES is utilized

There are four levels of utilization for BES that an operator can exploit. The first is simply the infrastructure level, and encompasses broadband pipe and basic communication services, such as voice and, messaging. In this case, the BES makes what was once a dumb pipe smart through a differentiated and monetized customer experience.

Infrastructure enablement is the second level, where CSPs provide infrastructure as a service (IaaS) to enterprises and SMEs, or enter vertical industries with partners by exploiting their industry-specific expertise and capabilities. CSPs are well positioned here as they are already trusted providers of reliable and secure communication services.

The third level is consumer service enablement, and this is where CSPs form an alliance with OTT players to provide innovative services that deliver a superb user experience. CSPs can expose their internal capabilities such as billing, charging, communication services, payment, customer preference storage, and service context to facilitate service innovation for OTT players, and get a slice of their revenue.

The top level is simply consumer services, where an aggressive CSP might compete directly with OTT players to establish their brand in the consumer market. With a BES in place, a CSP will be become local or regional economic leader, with all the advantage that this implies. Market cases currently include Telefonica Digital and SingTel Digital Media.

Many CSPs will prefer to stay in their comfort zone with simple pipe services, but even they will need BES to stay ahead of agile competitors, while those looking to take enablement further, such as Vodafone (with its stated intention of being the Amazon of telcos), will certainly need it. In the digital economy, differentiation is profit, and BES is how we get there, through its innovation, agility, value creation, and on-demand experiences. It is a neurodynamic tree, of sorts, that can thrive in any climate, responding to user needs with a speed that will make the other trees seem ordinary.