Accelerating Innovation: A Guide to Intelligent Decoupling

Telcos operate in an increasingly complex world, where enterprise customers have exceptionally intricate requirements, and even small businesses are far from straightforward. The ability to respond rapidly to market changes and customer demands is critical.

In such an environment, innovation has never been more necessary. Telcos can be both inspired by highly scalable, agile and customer-centric technology companies, yet also find themselves fundamentally challenged by them. More and more are recognizing the need to adopt a similar model: hence the rise of the techco in telecoms circles.

But while innovation has become ever more important, many sales efforts are hindered by legacy order management systems. The underpinning architecture of these systems can, in many cases, actively impede the process of successfully launching new products and creating clear competitive positions.

Fortunately, this is not a how-to manual for ripping out and replacing these legacy systems. Instead in this article we explain how a form of system architecture we call ‘Intelligent Decoupling’ allows you to swiftly and easily integrate a new commercial layer on to your existing systems — and how this simple move can transform your business’ capacity for commercial innovation.

Intelligent decoupling enforces decoupling between the commercial layer (i.e. the commercial product catalog) and the technical and billing layers (i.e. the technical and billing product catalogs). This decoupling enables the commercial organization to innovate commercially without being burdened by the complex decomposition and expectations of other systems.

Even so, the commercial layer is still responsible for mapping commercial products modelled in the commercial catalog (after a deal is done) to any other system expecting to know about what was sold (e.g. delivery and billing systems). For this reason, Intelligent Decoupling only applies to solution components that have already been modelled in your product catalogue and downstream technical and billing layers.

Three key business goals: innovate, negotiate, deliver

The transformation of B2B telco services continues on its fast-paced trajectory. Customer demands are changing. Vendor loyalty is weakening. Orders are becoming more complex. And the competition is picking up the pace.

Every telco has its own unique approach to addressing these challenges. But regardless of the specifics of your strategy, there are three key business goals you are aiming for:

These three goals have to be carefully balanced.

An exclusive focus on commercial innovation may appear to be the best approach, but it will soon be undermined if you haven’t got the fundamentals of provisioning and billing in place.

In one scenario, you could release a service to market before all the necessary systems are aware of the new offering. Your customers will be waiting too long for something they purchased in good faith; and when they do get it, the market will have moved on, and your “innovation” is now just another service in a competitive landscape.

In another case, you could ensure innovation, delivery and billing are all lined up by keeping your commercial catalog tightly aligned with your technical catalog. However, that would result in a technically-focused sales user journey, which would require highly technical sales people to explain and sell the proposition to a customer, making the deal harder to close. To remedy this, a service provider is then compelled to build customized user journeys for every complex commercial offering, thereby increasing time to market and inhibiting commercial innovation.

In short, without the means to balance these goals and effectively map your end-to-end processes, your innovation efforts cannot deliver value to you or your customers.

When system architecture is too rigid

To strike the right balance between the three key business goals, we need to implement a systems architecture that allows system components to be independent from one another. The component that undergoes the most frequent changes then has the responsibility for communicating those changes to the other components in a language they understand (no matter what the system component is and what language it speaks).

Given that commercial innovation needs to be able to operate on a timescale of hours and days, this responsibility should be given to an independent commercial layer that translates and communicates its innovation to any downstream system that needs to know about the details hidden behind the mask of commercial innovation.

Implementing this type of architecture will:

However, the systems in place at most organizations were designed for an earlier era, and prioritised provisioning of services above all else. These systems are usually tightly coupled, meaning that you have to model any change in the product catalog in all relevant downstream systems, which are often difficult to change.

At best, this kind of legacy architecture slows down commercial innovation. In today’s businesses, which recognize the need to regularly offer new commercial propositions, this architecture is a significant resource- and time-intensive hurdle.

The good news is that it is possible to implement a commercial layer that delivers all the benefits of the ideal state without the disruption of ripping out existing systems.

Intelligent decoupling in action

To illustrate how intelligent decoupling might work in practice, let’s look at a theoretical launch of a new commercial offering from a fictional telco, Telecom Extra. 

Telecom Extra has identified a gap in the business market: mid-size enterprise customers who want to do more with their data but are overwhelmed by choices. The new year is right around the corner, and Telecom Extra wants to launch a new commercial offering for these customers — the Business Booster —at the beginning of January. 

The Business Booster is based on existing technical services, and consists of:

Having worked out the commercials, Telecom Extra’s product management team enters the details of the commercial offering into the commercial product catalog (including any required business rules that govern it). The business team configures the translation between the new commercial offering and any relevant entities recognized by the provisioning and billing systems. The sales teams are briefed, the financial targets are set and support materials produced. With all hands to the wheel, the Business Booster is ready to hit the market in January.

Crucially, Telecom Extra has not had to spend months updating all its systems to reflect the arrival of the Business Booster.

That’s because Telecom Extra has an intelligently decoupled order management system. It can make changes at the commercial level without dealing with complex decomposition and expectations of its downstream systems.

The product catalog contains an item called the Business Booster, with all the commercial details included. But the individual provisioning layers for consulting services, connectivity services and software tools don’t have any reference to the Business Booster. The commercial system simply sends them an order for all the relevant constituent parts. Equally, the billing system understands to bill the purchased services sold under the umbrella of the Business Booster. None of these downstream systems have been re-configured, re-coded or undergone any lengthy updates.

That’s good news for Telecom Extra, because it has ambitious plans for the future: the Enterprise Express, the Productivity Pack and the Office Optimizer are all in the pipeline, to be swiftly and seamlessly launched to market when the time is right. No one will be touching the provisioning or billing systems.

As noted above, this kind of rapid innovation is possible when the components are pre-existing in your downstream systems. Any 100% novel technical product introduced into the product catalog has to also be modelled in the technical and billing layers.

Thinking differently about legacy

Inevitably, any discussion about legacy systems raises the fear of wholesale replacements: the disruption they cause, the headaches that arise, and the alarming visions of spiralling costs they produce.

That is not the case here.

Although legacy systems can be a hurdle for telcos looking to innovate and differentiate at speed, ripping them out is absolutely unnecessary. You keep your preferred billing and delivery systems in place, you maintain the relationships with the vendors of your choice, and the investments you have already made continue to deliver returns.

What is new is adding an innovative commercial layer that can:

The commercial product catalog is updated frequently. The commercial layer is therefore responsible for mapping any new commercial offering that is modelled post-deal to any other system that needs to know what was sold. It can decouple from these downstream systems once the changes have been made, and then re-couple via intelligent data exchange any time an order is being delivered.

This is the solution to simultaneously deliver on the three aforementioned key business goals — innovation, sales negotiation and delivery — without compromising on any of them. That’s when you can achieve true innovation: releasing the products your customers want at the time they want them, and securing the commercial and competitive advantage for your business.

CloudSense is a world leading Commercial Order Management and CPQ solution, designed to help telcos, techcos and everything in between optimize their end-to-end sales processes to deliver greater value to B2B customers.

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