How BSS/OSS Is The Key To Staying In The Telecommunication Business

A pair of approaches to managing the immense data in telecommunication is known as BSS/OSS, acronyms for business support system and operations support systems. For clarity, the business systems are all the processes which deal with the consumer, the people portion. The operations system deals with all the process that deliver the actual service, the hardware portion.

The coverage of this industry is truly global, between the ubiquitous towers from which the name cellular derives and the satellites above orbiting the globe. It is why with the right handheld device, a phone call can be made from even the most austere isolated place on earth. The complexity of the process of providing this kind of any time any place technology is lost on the consumers who depend on it. They take it for granted that it will work.

It is a constant challenge to determine the right balance of focus between the two necessary parts of the industry. With the incredible cost of upgrading infrastructure, there is an overwhelming tendency to focus on the people and service part. This is, of course, an unsustainable process for any provider who wants to keep up with the competition.

Focusing on the people part of the industry is normal, given that management can easily see the results of their decisions and this is the portion that generates income. The hardware side, however, is where the ingenuity and capability is created in order to satisfy the consumer base. The key to easing the impact of financing the unglamorous but critical portion of the job is to creatively present the laborious portion in relation to the service it creates.

There have been some successful telecommunications providers who have made quite a presentation of technical hardware infrastructure development while focusing on all the service this hardware creates. This allows a public focus on both company practices working well while having one bolster the other. This is an ingenious way to have the moneys spent bolstering the consumer process side which the consumer usually ignores.

In this complicated industry, management must essentially run two businesses at the same time. They have to keep the hardware working, expanding and changing, while at the same time managing the service provision side of business. Computers are obviously critical to this field and they have been using them for nearly half a century. But now, first level computers are not enough.

The solution is to orchestrate a series of computer programs to be able to drill down through data to find that important inquiry that is on the table. The business has been entering data into computers for nearly half a century. These first level computers have an enormous quantity of data, but it is nearly impossible to extract the exact threads of data needed for a single decision. A computer program to drive the first level computers to surrender the data in packets of information is key.

Staying at the forefront of such a dynamic field as the communication world requires a tremendous expenditure of energy to staying in touch with the science and at the same time, determining which way the pendulum of public desire is swinging. This requires the ability to not only collect data, which the industry has tremendous capacity for but to reach that data in a usable way. This requires a sophisticated OSS billing process which balances the companies focus.