Along with another thing you may not want to acknowledge – that you continue to sink a significant amount of resources into traditional business and operational support applications and architectures with no end in sight. To make matters worse, your fallout rates never seem to improve, despite the promises made by traditional vendors. Throw in mounting pressure to meet consumer demand for the latest and greatest digital service offerings with the slim hope of meeting their expectations before they churn. If any of this rings a bell, you may want to ask yourself the following questions:
- Do your current vendors insist on doing things the way they always have by staking out a niche space and holding onto it for dear life without taking a holistic view of the problems you are facing?
- Are business rules duplicated across the stack from CRM through order management, provisioning and billing yet never seem to remain in-sync for long?
- Does it still take forever to get simple services deployed to production? Do your fallout rates spike until teams scramble to patch up deployments?
If the answer to any of these questions is yes, rest assured you are far from alone. Traditional commerce and operations applications and architectures continually fail to deliver on promises of faster time-to-market for new services, increased customer satisfaction and reduced fallout.
So, is there a solution?
Just for a moment, discard the notion of the traditional stack. Instead, position a next generation best-of-breed enterprise catalog at the center of a new architecture. A catalog that is capable of modeling a complete and consistent set of products, services and resources along with the business rules required to offer, fulfill and provision them. Incorporate a toolset that allows product managers, fulfillment designers as well as technical resources to collaborate and contribute to the modelling of new product offerings (away with the shuffling of business rules and data from application to application within the stack!).
Finally, layer on a high performance open API that allows any application at any time to access the master model real-time during operations. This means that the CRM system accesses the enterprise catalog rule set during guided selling the same way that order management does during fulfillment, and provisioning does during activation.
I think you’re getting the idea…consistency in application behaviors across the software platform and the ability to instantly react to changes in the master model is key to faster time-to-market, increased customer satisfaction and reduced fallout. Call it agile operations, thinking out-of-the-box, or just being plain smart about where you put your next round of investment dollars. It just doesn’t have to be that difficult.
