Communication Services

<p style="text-align: justify;">I believe the historical thinking of BSS and OSS have to change; they need a technology with capabilities to keep up with the pace of innovation in the industry. Because of the inherent complexity of the telecom industry, CSPs will need a WSS. What is WSS? Well, as my telecom alum would say, we love our acronyms. So I introduced this new one to the team last week after some brainstorming with Yossi Zohar. Workflow Support System(s); the connective tissue abstracting the complexity between OSS and BSS.</p><p style="text-align: justify;">Marc Hayden, a co-worker of mine, shared the following with me, and I love it; CSPs will have to leverage what they have today, enhance for tomorrow, and then ultimately transform for the future. I believe ServiceNow can do this for CSPs.</p><p style="text-align: justify;">3 reasons why I believe ServiceNow is WSS ready</p><p style="text-align: justify;">1: Laser focused on telecom:</p><p style="text-align: justify;">ServiceNow has brought together the people, processes, technology and culture in support of industries, especially telecom. Three future framed innovations have been born by this team.</p><p style="text-align: justify;">Telecom Service Management (TSM); where ebonding, a telco based data model, and service assurance workflows come alive. Leveraging standards such as TMForum&rsquo;s open APIs framework, like TMF642 for example, is key.</p><p style="text-align: justify;">Telecom Network Performance Management (TNPM); where, through strategic partnerships with VIAVI, FEDEROS, EXFO, and more, accelerate event correlation. Coupled with ServiceNOW&rsquo;s service aware CMDB, we begin to bridge alarms to customer impacts proactively. This doesn&rsquo;t even take into account the innovation that will inherently come from the Element AI acquisition.</p><p style="text-align: justify;">Order Management for Telecom (OMT); where a configurable service catalog and order decomposition workflow enables an ability to manage fulfilment at the solution level.</p><p style="text-align: justify;">2: A configurable, low code capability:</p><p style="text-align: justify;">Why make this a point? I have two thoughts that come to mind:</p><p style="text-align: justify;">Technology debt is rampant in telecom. What better way to start to control than with a platform enabling configuration in a low code/no code ecosystem. Flow Designer, App Engine Builder, and UI Builder are just some of the capabilities, I believe, ServiceNow offers to enable CSPs to take control of technology debt.</p><p style="text-align: justify;">Changing the way an organization does something is hard. What better way to smooth-out the adoption speed bumps than having those currently doing the work, involved in the transformation. The NOW platform enables this by creating &lsquo;citizen developers&rsquo;, empowering those in operations to configure the changes in the platform. What a better way to create buy-in! Don&rsquo;t you worry seasoned developers, an advanced programming palette is at your fingertips too.</p><p style="text-align: justify;">3: Fulfilment and Assurance are better together:</p><p style="text-align: justify;">When I was in operations, time and time again, test and turn up would occur and a customer would call in and share, &ldquo;My service is dead on arrival&rdquo;. What a frustrating experience! Then, and only then, the arduous task of stitching the fulfilment tasks within the ticket/incident would begin. Why not manage both within a platform consisting of a common data model in support of a service aware topology, CMDB; I believe this to be ServiceNOW.</p>