Integrating CRM and Billing Systems

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This would be one of the integral links in any enterprise level BSS Project chunk in a larger BSS/OSS implementation .Actually if you look at this topic from different angles you might see the picture differently depending upon the role you are playing in this integration. The roles can be the enterprise business analysts ,disparate vendors providing the CRM and Billing solutions in the form of off the shelve packages, IT backoffice team defining the IT backbone for the enterprise operations flow, Financial and Auditing teams, Executive management teams and several other teams who if not involved in giving shape to the integration output ,build their expectations of better business turnover in their silos based on the success of this integration.

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Multiple Invoices for Mutliple Services of a Subscriber account.- Final Part

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Multiple Invoices for Multiple ServicesGot a little bit late in following this up.  Actually in the first part itself should have shared a diagram below which would have helped in giving a general feel as to why and how we have a multiple service – multiple Invoice scenario.

Well I thought instead of trying to summarize let me link up to the Q & A directly. This will benefit readers in reading first hand the exchanges and points made by learned folks of the B/OSS area on linkedin.
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Operational Mistakes in B/OSS Systems – How can we get Better

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No amount of training can unfortunately prevent this. Humans are prone to making mistakes. Spent 12 hours of my precious Saturday trying to come up with logic of recovery for corrupted data at customer site thousands of miles away. Well the last few words meant that this is a global phenomenon and you cannot fully stop this .

But there should be ways to minimize this .Learnings from mistakes have to incorporated in day-to-day policies guiding operational practices of Telco IT divisions or Other teams manning the Production Utilities and Systems of such an arena.
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Multiple Invoices for Mutliple Services of a Subscriber account. – Part 1

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So currently I have created a question thread and getting feedback from different folks about this aspect. Through that thread I am trying to asses in a segregated manner the real usefulness of this phenomena and who is it really useful for?
On linkedin.com in Q&A section under the category Technology ->IT->telecommunications or Technology->wireless look the question “Payments on Service wise Invoices – Single or Multiple Payments?”. Not pasting the explicit link yet as would wait for other comments to pour in till the end of the open period.
So to summarize on that thread as till now the kind opinions expressed by the learned area exponents is of unanimous tone that you keep a single Invoice for more or less related services like voice,fax,sms but would probably think of having separate Invoices for converged services like Voice ,Broadband ,IPTV and the like .
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Learning Telecom Billing Concepts – How to make a Start?

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In a Telco billing system a person who is offering the Telco services can be the same guys who are providing the network backbone for supporting the provision of those services and hence they can be called Network Service Providers OR if they are just providing the Telco service they can just be called the Telco service operators.
The end customer meaning us using the services of the Telco service provider would be called the Subscriber.

On a rough and simplistic note,

1) First we should recognize the concepts of different intervals in which accounting tasks are done and also the popularly solemnized billing cycles at the end of which Invoices are sent to customers. Simple Googling on these terms will help you get familiarized with these terms.
2) Then you should focus on the rentals concept meaning the subscription fees of services that a typical subscriber in a billing system would be tied to.
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IT Architecture World Summit 2009 (Note – 1)

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This happened at the J N TATA Auditorium of the IISC campus in Bangalore on July 27 & 28th. It was a very good events with focus on several tracks of Software Architecture, Enterprise Architecture, Business Process Management, SOA, SaaS and Transformation, Cloud computing and several other useful subjects.

Now this event acted as an eye opener in the evolving fields of BPM & EA. Curiously enough I was focused on catching concepts that would indeed have the possibilities of application in this sphere of B/OSS. And indeed in the Business Process Management session of Outside-In philosophy of business transformation so as to completely align business processes entirely around the one ever-pervasive end goal of business “the real needs of the customer”.

In this session Mr. Steve Towers a very well known and extremely prudent exponent of the BPM world gave an extremely wonderful presentation on the critical 8 step guide to effective ‘Outside-In’ style of Enterprise functioning which helps in drastic cost reduction. And in this from the communication world, mention was made of China Telecom who is said to be drastically reducing costs and becoming more business effective with this new Outside-In style of functioning.

The other one, which seemed impressive was Mr. David Frankel the pioneer as far as MDA style of Architecture is concerned, one of the early doyens on the OMG group gave a very rich presentation on evolving Metadata concepts.
Then there was also Mr. Ajit Kalle – Delivery Unit Head of Tech Mahindra who also showed how much courage and grit is required in venturing as well driving with force absolutely new concepts as far as organizational transformation is concerned using EA. A very enthralling linkup of the several bundles of EA concepts was quite mind stimulating.

Several of the Keynote sessions as well as end of day Panel Discussions were also a treat to watch. Indeed a good 2 days of Intellectual stimulation, which opened me up to several of these avenues to expand my horizons of knowledge enrichment.
I will come up with further stuff from this summit as I go unraveling whatever I have learnt and go forward doing my self- delegated homework tasks, which are my takeaways from this summit.

This was a true effort at knowledge seeking considering the fact that I self funded my participation in this summit :-) .