PDF of this tutorial
In the past, the development of services relied on vertically integrated, often on-switch services. This has given way to the development of consolidated tool sets for the creation of services, especially on the network side of the equation. A similar consolidation is now occurring in enterprise systems to encompass real-time billing, customer care, and provisioning.
Just as IN models allowed the consolidation of network-based service creation elements, application services framework allows service providers to consolidate enterprise and network facing systems into an integrated, flow-through, service-management and customer-care process. Real-time billing is a good example of an emerging service model that takes into account this flow-through requirement.
Services: Escalating Back-Office Integration
Although service creation processes have become more generic and automated, many of the processes involved in customer care are manual (i.e., they rely upon direct data transfer through a human operator). For example, when making long-distance calls, if customers have difficulty completing the calls or have been disconnected, they may call customer service. When this happens, customer service representatives (CSRs) must have access to some of the systems involved in making calls.
The CSRs may look for network problems or service orders for a particular portion of the network. If the call was disconnected, the CSR may issue a credit, sometimes directly into the billing system. In the case of local telephone service, the CSR must be able to test a customer's telephone line, review current trouble tickets, and schedule network repairs to make certain that problems are resolved. Furthermore, other CSRs must be able to answer follow-up questions from the customer if they call in again.
A manual approach to customer care and back-office service management is shown in Figure 5. In many cases, the CSR is the single point of contact between a customer and complex processes of service management platforms. As a result, costs are escalating, and error-rates are increasing.
Figure 5. CSRS—A Manual Interface to Back-Office SystemsURE
The characteristics of the customer-service call define requirements that hold true for new applications today. There are a number of real-time (in this basic case, standardized) interactions between applications for network management and the service itself.
Competitive carriers who wish to overcome this customer-support bottleneck must design adaptable processes within an automated data model to outline the complex interactions of the complete workflow process for customer service. The payoffs for better (automated) customer-support processes are large. Better pricing, effective customer service, and accurate billing are the most immediate advantages that competitive carriers have over incumbents.
Automation: The Core of Back-Office Integration
A complex set of applications must work together, increasingly in real time, to make the following customer interactions possible:
- billing
- customer care (call center)
- authorization and authentication
- fraud detection
- provisioning
A single service requires interactions at the OSS and BSS level that draw on several IT systems. Customer care, once manually defined by a human operator, has become a comprehensive service automation requirement. Integrated customer care and flow-through provisioning issues are most acute when offering bundled Web, local, long-distance, and VPN services. This bundling and autoprovisioning is precisely what defines the competitive trend.
Customer Self-Care and E-Commerce: Reshaping Services
In the new services model, flow-through processes require more IT integration with services. The interactions are changing between customer-care and billing subsystems and the services they support. Namely, they must be far more sophisticated than in the long-distance CSR example discussed earlier. From a billing perspective, one of the main shifts is a move from offline, batch processing, to real-time interactions. Because of the growing market demands for configurable service management, real-time mediation services will be bundled with network services, allowing users to access billing information to manage their networks. For enterprise customers who self-provision, emphasis is increasingly placed on integrated strategies for service creation, network management, and back-office transaction-processing systems.
In addition, the billing system may have a more active role in defining the service itself. A good example of this is the need for billing to integrate closely with quality-of-service (QoS) definitions for network management. QoS management requires far more data-intensive and real-time monitoring, as well as reconfigurable service definitions.
The idea of customer self-management is not new. Many large enterprises already connect with their telecommunications providers via a Web browser. This browser-based console enables enterprises to access information about their network and to order additional capacity where needed. It is also common for large enterprises to pay their bills electronically and to contest various line items on-line. Although the interfaces are electronic, many of these services are delivered manually (see Figure 6).
Figure 6. Traditional Approach versus Customer Self-Management
Customer self-management requires service providers to expose their internal processes and IT directly to their customers, and much of the costly integration work has yet to be done. There is a difference between offering these services on a limited basis to hundreds of customers and selling Web-based services to millions of subscribers. Much of the integration required to deliver a Web-based interface for customer access to back-office applications has never been done before.
Extending Mediation to Flow-Through Provisioning
Increasingly, the key differentiation for a competitive service offering is the ability to provision service quickly and on demand, using browser interfaces. For example, a mediation provider had initially added application services platform to process multiple-vendor CDR formats in a billing environment. Modifying the existing data formats was a logical add-on to this strategy, and it allowed for the extension, albeit with some manual processes, to a commissioning module for provisioning digital subscriber line (DSL) access service. A basic service management question with regard to extending instant-response service to the customer has been successfully addressed.
This service was based on a mediation product offering that incorporates an application services framework. Project managers made it clear that while development was required, the process was far faster and less expensive than under prior methods. The capabilities of application services framework were used to add real-time provisioning capabilities. The task of creating 100 percent of a new provisioning mediation framework was not repeated; the mediation framework was modified from an existing model already used once to generate CDR interfaces to billing. In this case, the billing objects were modified and applied to the provisioning of a new service in as little time as possible–several months, as opposed to six or more. The role the CLEC plays in managing new DSL service relationships puts it in an excellent position to continue to leverage its customer support investment for the addition of new services.
Survivability of Existing Investment
As with the support cost savings in the first example, cost avoidance is dramatic. Without reusable service models, project managers have made it clear that the very same effort and cost as was expended on the billing integration project would have to be repeated. Application services framework creates a generic transparency between application APIs, network and transaction Interfaces, and the application logic. This eliminates the need to reimplement the same services for other enterprise application projects.
As the provisioning example suggests, application services framework offers a full complement of components and adapters that expand the functionality of the execution engine. Part of its appeal to service providers lies in the ability to add and expand functionality using a well-defined UML modeling environment. Adapters supporting industry standards include signaling network management protocol (SNMP), signaling system 7 (SS7)/transactional capabilities application part (TCAP), CORBA Services, domain naming system (DNS), lightweight directory access protocol (LDAP), Web/Internet services, and database support for Oracle, Informix, and Sybase. Application models for CDR mediation and automated provisioning are available.
Support for native adapters frees developers from hand-coding and integrating low-level infrastructure services. Using an application services platform design center, developers model UML–based flow-through application logic to launch their services quickly, leveraging existing assets and skill sets.
Meeting Life-Cycle and Support Needs
Just as reuse overcomes many support cost concerns, the extensibility of interfaces overcomes the fundamental fast-launch, short-recovery profile of services today (see Figure 7). In addition, the requirements of the CLEC are typical of any service provider, though business models vary. In the example for billing and provisioning integration, a CLEC could just as easily be replaced in this example by an ILEC with extensive, costly requirements for electronic bonding (to the CLEC, in all likelihood) and provisioning. It is in solving this type of crucial problem that application services platform shows its true potential for delivering enhanced mediation solutions.
Figure 7. Reuse and Extensibility of Mediation Frameworks
In the first stage, this tutorial discussed an example limited to billing across a predefined set of network and service elements. In this second-stage example, the service provider has added provisioning. The development of and extensibility to other applications enables the service providers to leverage the billing-related investment to more than one back-office application for more than one customer interface. In addition, because application services framework applications reside in-memory, automatic application-recovery services are provided within the execution engine, enabling a service provider to assure its services on a 24-hours-a-day, 7-days-a-week basis.
Against the backdrop of the existing IN model, Figure 8 depicts the transition to a full back-office consolidation of service creation resources. As the Web interface for provisioning suggests, this integration trend does not stop at the back office. It also extends to customer enterprises, third-party transaction services, and other enterprise IT systems. The extension of a billing CDR mediation investment quickly migrates to the creation of a more complete flow-through provisioning and customer-care system. As services are being created across interconnected networks and enterprises using an unpredictable set of resources and customer-defined elements, a more coherent application services framework is emerging.
Figure 8. Consolidating IT Resources for Service Creation and Management
