The Yellow Brick Road: Contracting for OSS Success in IP Telephony (cont'd)

Meantime, most BSS/OSS systems on the market remain expensive and complex and need armies of integration specialists to make them work together. While that might suit some vendors, service providers are no longer willing to transfer billions of dollars to the bank accounts of their systems suppliers. There are lots of older and wiser people in the service provider community today who are more interested in spending their limited dollars wisely. To help get value for money, one should consider some principles from the 'Pragmatic ROI' approach outlined in May's Pipeline (see Pipeline, May 2004) to add some key service provider objectives into a contract for the supply of BSS/OSS applications.

Before You Sign Anything...
The decision to move to fully-fledged IP Telephony from legacy PSTN is a serious one. The service provider has to balance some conflicting motivations, which need to be teased out in Step 1 of the Pragmatic ROI: Why should we do something? (The Concept phase)

• This step should answer some key questions about how IP Telephony progresses the company towards its overall vision and mission.

Having decided that something must be done, one moves on to the Feasibility phase, in which it is determined what can or must be done and how to handle the resulting impact. This should all be done before asking an SI or application vendor to visit for a sales pitch. Questions to consider include:

• If we need new systems, who offers packages that might work? Who else is using them? What is the list price for licenses? Do we need to integrate into our existing environment? Can we? Should we use a web-services approach to keep most systems separate with a consolidated view provided only via reach-through? What are the pros and cons?

By the end of the Feasibility phase, it's been established that something can be done. This then leads to the Design phase. First, formal definitions of success for each step in the project must be established, for example:

• The new web portal must enable information access to these systems
• The new applications must not require an upgrade to end user computers
• Customers must be able to create their new service in less than "y" clicks

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