Posted: 01/2000
Managing Post-Merger IT Integration
By Kevin Kohn
Mergers, acquisitions and rapidly changing technologies have added to the complexity of doing business in a global economy. At an increasing rate, corporations are merging to achieve better economies of scale, increase their competitive position and improve customer service. However, these mergers do not come without problems and added complexities. One such issue is the difficulty of merging disparate IT infrastructures, many of which are proprietary and include hundreds of legacy systems.
The legacy systems that sit at the core of corporate IT infrastructures cannot be integrated easily with new technologies, nor can the legacy systems be replaced easily. Adding to this situation is that, in general, investments in IT have been tactical, not strategic, focused on solving today's departmental problems and not tomorrow's enterprise solutions. Finally, the key business processes that drive revenue and control costs are different from corporation to corporation, even when these firms are in the same industry.
The result of these changing conditions is that companies have myriad hardware, software and applications that are not working together. Companies cannot continue to compete in today's frenetic environment with disparate, unconnected IT infrastructures. Increasingly, customers expect fast answers, proactive account management and products and services tailored to their specific business needs. Companies, no matter how big or small, have to rise to the challenge of bringing together the disparate systems and mission-critical applications that support their customers across the enterprise. The solution to integrating IT infrastructures must be flexible and scaleable to support growth, leverage existing IT investments and tie together the company's unique business processes.
To shorten the time-to-market for services, telecommunications service providers are forced to rethink their current business practices. An OSS that brings systems and people together to work more efficiently can be a competitive advantage, but only if it automates the business processes at an enterprise level.
To streamline business processes, from preordering to billing, means allowing carriers to turn service delivery into a unified whole instead of a fragmented operation that resists management. At bottom is a tremendous need for an integrated, interdepartmental view of the business. Otherwise, discrete islands of information will sink the business. Organizations must be able to leverage existing information regardless of department, application, system type or where the information resides.
It may be argued that synchronizing various front-end applications with back-office legacy systems is a tall order. Legacy systems may not be faddish, but their useful life can be extended if they are integrated with current processes. The goal is to get a higher-level view of the business without requiring people to adopt a whole new way of working. It also is essential that managers not allow themselves to be influenced by the underlying technology in their decision-making. Otherwise the manager and the business department finds itself at the service (and mercy) of the systems.
Industry analysts perceive OSS as the glue that binds disparate applications into a unified system. Managers who are responsible for tracking and managing orders proactively, making changes in real time and finding bottlenecks in the process before service levels decline certainly can benefit with a cohesive OSS. Managers know that the successful product launch is predicated on the organization's ability to fulfill the order once it is placed. The effects of new technologies on OSS solutions is evident as organizations attempt to rapidly deal with the changes in technology, products, services, regulations and customer preferences.
It's no secret that all service providers face the challenge of getting new services to market fast. Nobody is short on ideas, and turning them into viable services is not too hard. New middleware solutions are emerging to help providers simplify the service-provisioning process and meet their delivery deadlines. Service activation is complex. For every new service an operator delivers, significant alterations need to be made to its OSS.
The difficulties arise from the way the industry has developed. Traditionally, telcos have launched their businesses with equipment from just one network entry point (NEP): Their network management system, documentation database and provisioning system will come from the same company. Even today, as they move into Internet protocol (IP)-based services, the process is the same: They initially will buy equipment from just one supplier.
However, as they grow, most service providers tend to acquire equipment from a variety of vendors. Eventually, they arrive at the point where, to deliver a single new service at the front end, they have to disentangle--at least metaphorically--a complex web of incompatible networks and OSSs at the back end to make it work.
"Business customers especially are demanding just one interface and just one order," says Jean-Luc Spagnol, OSS solutions manager at Sun Microsystems Inc. (www.sun.com). "They don't want to put in one order for a GSM (global systems for mobile) service and another for a short message service. But for the telco, such a request will translate into multiple service-activation requests."
The biggest carriers tackle the problem internally; the smaller ones outsource to systems integrators. Either way, it is a costly process, and a lengthy one, which may eventually result in a solution that no longer meets initial expectations.
Two Approaches to Integration
As the pressure grows on telcos to provide innovative services more quickly, a number of companies are coming up with solutions designed to eliminate some of the complexities of service activation. There are two main approaches.
The first approach involves middleware. The idea is to install a separate software layer--a new communications backbone--on the operations side, and then connect all the existing back-end applications to it to enable them to interwork. The advantage is that the carrier can protect its investment in its existing systems. Companies now offering such solutions in the telecom arena include InConcert (www.inconcert.com), ObjectSwitch Corp. (www.objectswitch.com) and TIBCO Software Inc. (www.tibco.com).
Any ideal solution should provide an effective framework for automating business processes and integrating departmental and legacy systems to create cohesive yet flexible OSS for service providers. The OSS should model, execute and report on the entire provisioning process, including order management, switching, billing and customer care, rather than simply managing individual network elements. This integration allows work and information to flow between departments and their systems.
Such middleware solutions also simplify the process of modifying or adding services in the future. "Once a bus is in place, the telco no longer needs to alter each OSS separately," explains Sun's Spagnol. "They just rewrite some of the rules, and the framework directs operations like the conductor of an orchestra."
The alternative integration strategy takes an architectural approach, rebuilding part of the infrastructure so it will interwork with the rest. Architel Systems Corp. (www.architel.com) is moving to offer this, based on the expansion of its own expertise from service activation to other areas of the network. Last year, Architel acquired a company called Accugraph, whose network inventory product complements its own, and it is now bringing an integration solution to the market based on an amalgam of the two technologies.
Sun has begun to work with all these companies as they develop their next-generation solutions. On the middleware side, its partners are making increasing use of Java and Corba to link applications to the bus and to manage the interfaces. In its next-generation products, InConcert, for example, is using Corba at the back end as the communications technology for the bus, and using Java at the front end to build adapters that interface with the bus. Corba allows for network transparency at the back end, and by using Java at the interface, the platform is made transparent. If you write an adaptor in Java, it will run on Hewlett-Packard, Sun, Microsoft Windows NT or any other platform; plus, there's the added bonus of having to write it only once.
Single vs. Merged OSS
Let's consider a single company's OSS. This OSS incorporates billing, customer care, service provisioning and other departments and their systems. In many of today's telecommunications companies, these systems are not integrated with each other, making it difficult for customer care agents to track order status or answer the most basic customer questions. If these systems were integrated using workflow technology, customer care agents could access order status in real-time, or customers could obtain it directly over the Internet.
Companies deploy workflow solutions with the goal of optimizing their business processes. Workflow technology consists of a process template that describes exactly what tasks need to be executed within a process, what tools are used to execute that task, the user profile required to execute the task and the information that must be available.
The workflow engine controls and monitors all of the defined work processes, links all of the information necessary for the individual task and, if necessary, invokes other applications.
France's Bouygues Telecom (www.bouyguestelecom.fr) has implemented workflow for managing their customer ser-vices operations, a system that comprises 2,000 users handling 700,000 requests per month. Workflow methods are used to connect front- and back-office systems for data mining and warehousing and information extraction so staff can drill down and escalate issues to resolve problems quickly. At Bouygues Telecom, the primary motivation was cost savings.
"We expect workflow management to reduce costs by 20 [percent] to 30 percent for our customer-orientated operations-related back-office functions," says Francois Treuil, business process manager at Bouygues. "This includes such operations as takeovers, fulfillment, handset maintenance and all our retention programs."
Now let's consider a merged OSS, one that is comprised of several previously separate business units or companies. Another European service provider faced this very issue. Each time a customer called with a question, a customer care agent had to consult one of four different order management applications to determine the status of a product that was part of the product bundle. By integrating these separate systems using workflow, the company was able to replace these four separate customer care screens with a single web-based order status application accessed by customer care agents over a corporate intranet. Technology enabled the centralized tracking of an order across multiple distributed OSSs, eliminating the need for four separate order status applications and ultimately providing a single view of the order.
In this application, the process used to provision each product was modeled graphically rather than being hard-coded. Each step in these processes, such as sending an order to a LEC through an electronic data interchange (EDI) gateway, calls an application or is routed to an employee for completion. Metrics such as when work was started or completed are collected automatically for each step in the process. These metrics can be used to track order status, identify process bottlenecks or audit service level agreements (SLAs). Unexpected business events such as overdue tasks or errors also are tracked, enabling proactive jeopardy escalation or automated resolution. As a result of using workflow, orders are driven through the provisioning process, accelerating cycle times and improving quality by eliminating lost orders and missed interdepartment "hand-offs."
New products can be added to the product bundle by adding a new or existing OSS sub-process to the process that provisions the product bundle. Similarly, new work steps can be added to processes that call additional applications or replace existing ones; automated tasks can replace previously manual ones; and orders can be mass-customized to suit individual customer preferences. Because these changes are made to a business process model, rather than to a hard-coded program, they can be made by a systems analyst without undertaking a massive software development project.
Communications companies are expanding aggressively into new territories and service markets through mergers and acquisitions to hasten their rates of growth. Operationally, these companies must rapidly integrate distributed and often disparate IT infrastructures to maintain high-quality customer service across multiple product lines, functional areas and distribution channels. Workflow technology provides a key competitive advantage, enabling the creation of a cohesive and adaptive IT infrastructure that supports a rapidly evolving marketplace while providing companies with the ability to maintain best-in-class customer service.
 Kevin
Kohn is vice president of marketing and business development for InConcert
Inc., a Cambridge, Mass.-based company that develops, markets and supports
integration solutions for OSSs. He can be reached at Kkohn@inconcert.com
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