The Building Blocks of Next-Generation BSS
The ongoing roll-out of 5G and the continued emphasis on digital transformation are driving broad changes within the telecoms industry as communications service providers (CSPs) evolve into digital service providers (DSPs). CSPs have a large number of opportunities within their reach; these have been enabled by both the introduction of 5G and the broader ‘digital society’ wave that is reshaping economic flows and disrupting traditional supplier/distributor value chains. CSPs are responding to these trends by increasing their focus on developing capabilities that will allow them to swiftly embrace, and effectively monetise, emerging opportunities.
The main objective of CSPs, from an architecture design perspective, is to establish an agile, flexible and cost-effective foundation for the future. This is vital for mission-critical, customer-facing functions, especially in the light of rapidly evolving business and operating models. CSPs want to ensure that their investments are futureproof, the architecture is simple and systems operate efficiently at scale. In this regard, CSPs anticipate that the development of an automation friendly, independent, yet interconnected BSS framework will help to lower the cost of operations, improve the time to market and enable participation in a broader value chain. CSPs will embrace a software-oriented operations framework in the long term as 5G standalone becomes more commonplace. This will require agile, configurable and scalable BSS that are compliant with standardised interfaces which can swiftly respond to market changes and new opportunities.
THREE PRIMARY BUILDING BLOCKS OF NEXT-GENERATION BSS
The three fundamental building blocks for BSS of the future are customer engagement, monetisation platforms and digital marketplaces (figure 1). In the long term, CSPs will need to address BSS requirements both holistically and on a component level to ensure that the key capabilities and requirement specifications are satisfied.
Source: Analysys Mason, 2022
DIGITAL CUSTOMER ENGAGEMENT
Transformative digital experience goes beyond intuitive designs and seamless customer journeys. It requires an inside-out transformation of systemic capabilities that enables CSPs to autonomously support interactions over digital channels without having to rely on human intervention. Automation is even more complex to enable for enterprises because it requires synchronisation between multiple cross-domain systems including product catalogue, order management and orchestration. The framework shown in Figure 2 outlines which capabilities are considered to be essential and must co-exist with legacy capabilities that are still in use. In the long term, it is important that any digital customer engagement solution is able to continuously expand its capabilities without affecting ongoing operations.