There is often one person in an organisation that everyone turns to when something needs to be answered about their telecoms environment.
They know which suppliers the business uses, which contracts are coming up for renewal, who to contact when a service stops working and so on but there is a problem when expecting one person to understand an entire telecoms environment when they don’t have a complete picture of it.
This is not because that person lacks the capability to do so, but rather because the information they need is rarely sitting in one place. It’s spread across supplier portals, invoices, contracts, asset registers, spreadsheets, emails, internal systems and the knowledge of other people within the business. Some of that information may be outdated, some may contradict other records and some may never have been captured at all.
So while the telecom manager may be the person who knows the most, if they can’t see the full picture, how effectively is the telecom environment really being managed?
Telecom environments are not simple.
We need to distinguish the difference between having information and having visibility.
Information comes from various sources and can be scattered across dozens of places. Visibility takes that information a step further and uses different pieces of information to build a complete picture. Without that consolidated view, decisions can be based on incomplete or outdated information.
What if the information itself isn’t accurate?
There is another problem that is often overlooked. Even when information has been documented, that doesn’t mean it is necessarily correct. A spreadsheet might say a service is active when it has already been disconnected, an asset register might contain an old user or location, a supplier portal may show one set of information while an internal system shows another, a contract may have been renewed, but the old version is still being referenced internally.
The person managing the telecoms environment is then expected to make the right decisions while using siloed, inaccurate, incomplete and often contradicting information from multiple different systems. The problem isn’t the systems themselves, but it’s the fact that they were not designed to provide one complete view of the telecoms environment.
A centralised view changes the role of the telecoms manager
The answer isn’t to remove the person responsible for managing the telecoms environment or to suggest that technology can replace experience, it’s actually the opposite.
A skilled telecoms professional is far more valuable when they don’t have to spend their time hunting for information. A centralised telecoms management platform can bring information from different parts of the environment together, creating a more consistent view of services, suppliers, contracts, costs, assets, budgets and so on. It provides a foundation from which the telecoms manager can investigate issues, identify opportunities and make decisions based on a broader view of the environment.
This is where our Telegence platform plays an important role. Rather than relying on individual spreadsheets or a collection of disconnected sources, information can be brought together into a centralised environment that gives the business greater visibility and control.
An important strategic organisational goal should be to build a telecoms environment where no one person has to know everything because the business already has the visibility required to understand what it has, what it is paying for, how it is performing and where it needs attention.
