From BSS to BES: An age of enablement
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By Jiao Aijun
The business support system (BSS) is largely designed for the age of voice, text, and
data, but in the digital economy, the dumb pipe threat looms large over CSPs, and
BSS now must bridge the gap between network infrastructure and service innovation
that often starts from the Internet world. BSS must evolve from service support to
service enablement, culminating in an entirely new platform – the Business
Enablement Suite (BES)..
Network-centric BSS is no longer valid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, including 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 has led 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 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 storage leasing for 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. Success will
depend 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 become a local or regional economic leader, with all the
advantage that this implies. Market cases currently include Telefónica 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 that can thrive in any climate,
responding to user needs with a speed that will make the other trees seem like just part
of the landscape.
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