Abstract
This paper explores the competitive pressures which are behind the growing interest of
communications companies in applying spatial information technologies beyond the
traditional domain of ‘plan-build-record’. It argues that the need to compete on cost, quality of
service, and time to market, are making it mandatory for operators to automate and integrate
their business processes and systems, and it argues that this is creating both opportunities and
challenges for spatial information technologies. It draws upon conceptual models from the
fields of telecommunications and information systems, to describe how such technologies can
assume a key operational or strategic status when implemented as part of shared model of
network infrastructure - a Network Information System (NIS). It suggests that increasingly,
the real value of NIS will have far less to do with expanding the network, and much more to
do with optimizing performance in use.
The Customer ‘versus’ the Network
Competition - real and imminent - has been responsible for a major shift in the business focus
of communications companies. They are being transformed from network-centric operations
run by engineering, to customer-centric service organisations. In the course of this
transformation, operators have tended to overlook many of the failings of their existing
operational support systems for managing the network. Today few operators have in place a
system for managing network information which is comparable in scale or sophistication with
their customer information system (CIS).
The reality is that in many communications companies, the same networks will be represented
in dozens of different data models, each associated with different operational support systems
(0SS) for various activities which include network planning, provisioning, network
surveillance, outage management, works management, and so on. There are often many
manual transcriptions of information involved in the handovers from one 0SS to another.
Innovative communications companies are showing interest in implementing a shared data
model of information on the network - a Network Information System - which offers the
prospect of improving the flow-through of information and reducing transcriptions and
handovers [1]. This increasing demand for NIS can be traced to the competitive pressures
faced by modern communications companies, which we now discuss.
The Systems Integration Challenge
Behind the mergers and acquisitions which characterise the communications industry, there is
massive internal restructuring. Adams and Willetts talk of a shake-out in the communications
industry, in which only the ‘Lean Communications Providers’ will survive [2]. These will be
the operators which have automated the end-to-end flow through of processes involved in
service management and network management - much along the lines of the automobile
industry. It is only through automation, the authors argue, that operators will achieve the
reductions in cost, improvement in service quality, and reductions in time to market that will
ensure their survival.
They identify three components to automation and process flow-through:
- automating the process steps that were done by people, to be done by computer
- integrating the process steps to reduce manual handovers of information
- rebuilding processes to reflect new ways of doing business, as opposed to mechanizing existing processes
While the spatial information community has long argued that the greatest benefits of the
technology derive from integrating and rebuilding processes, the reality in the
communications industry is that operators have tended to limit the application of the
technology to automating discrete process steps, and particular those steps involved in the
‘plan-build-record’ activities of network evolution. Many operators are now contemplating
exploiting spatial technology beyond ‘plan-build-record’. They have evaluated the possibility
of building on existing systems, and found in many cases that legacy systems for network
planning have been put under stress by the need to compete. We can examine some of these
pressures.
Network expansion and the role of spatial information
Networks need to be planned and designed, whether or not the operator is facing competition.
However, the arrival of competition generally changes the planning process, and this in turn
creates new challenges and opportunities for spatial information systems which have
traditionally been so central to network planning.
For example, under a competitive environment, the pace of change is no longer determined by
engineering requirements, but is customer- and market-driven. In the past, it was sufficient to
base forecasts of demand on demographic and economic data for large areas, and extrapolate
from historic patterns. Increasingly the business requires much more sensitive forecasts (in
time and space) based on a variety of information sources (internal and external). New
technology is being applied to specific parts of the network on an as-needed basis, rather than
rolled out wholesale through the operator’s territory, according to an engineering schedule.
Planning has to be both proactive and reactive. The planner no longer has the unidimensional
task of minimizing capital costs, but is expected to consider recurrent costs, and multiple
objectives. He or she is increasingly expected to be multi-skilled, and able to plan networks
based on pooled information rather than local knowledge. All these changes brought about by
competition are challenging spatial information technology to justify its contribution to the
business. It has to demonstrate that it can model multiple networks, that it can integrate the
customer with the network, accommodate market intelligence, scale to hundreds of users, and
support long and short transactions. In Adarns and Willetts terms, it has to demonstrate its
capability not only to automate the steps of an existing process, but also to integrate steps,
and to accommodate new processes. It is expected to demonstrate that it is more than a
‘supporting’ technology, and that it has the potential to support the company’s core business.
