The next 18 months would be a "critical" time in Telstra's ongoing transformation of its operational support systems, the telco's chief information officer John McInerney said today.
The next 18 months would be a "critical" time in Telstra's ongoing transformation of its operational support systems (OSS), the telco's chief information officer John McInerney said today.
For Telstra, the next eighteen months is critical. It's really where the rubber hits the road for us from an OSS
perspective.
Telstra CIO John McInerney
Most of the talk on the company's five year transformation has
focused on billing systems and customer relationship management
systems, according to McInerney, despite the fact the OSS lay at
the heart of what telco's do.
"I must admit it's not one of the
sexiest topics going around in the industry, but it's really
important," he told CommsDay's Sydney conference. "It's effectively the thing from a telco
perspective that makes us tick."
The next eighteen months were going to be a hot spot of activity
for the systems, the CIO said, with planned outcomes to include benefits such as speedier time to market and reduced operating
costs.
"We've got some very significant drops for our OSS over the
next few months," McInerney said. The systems for mobiles would be
tackled in the next few months with vendors Amdocs and Oracle's MetaSolv,
while the next twelve months would take on broadband services, with
the same vendors. Then McInerney intended on
dealing with alarming and provisioning.
"For us, for Telstra, the next eighteen months is critical.
It's really where the rubber hits the road for us from an OSS
perspective," McInerney said.
Telstra has been using out of the box products, which McInerney
admitted had its own challenges, but said that Telstra had decided
to go that way so that it would be on those vendors technology
roadmap.
When asked generally about the things he would do again during
the five year transformation, McInerney said that he would have
focused more on simplification at the start of the project since he
said he had spent too much time replicating legacy in the new
systems. "Testing forty years of legacy is difficult," he
said.
