There are some things in business that we would never accept in other areas of the organisation. We wouldn’t accept a finance department that couldn’t explain where money was being spent. We wouldn’t continue paying for software nobody uses simply because nobody has checked the subscriptions. We wouldn’t sign a major supplier contract and then put it in a drawer for three years without ever reviewing whether the agreement still makes sense. Yet when it comes to telecommunications, many of these things happen every day.
Businesses have become so accustomed to the complexity of telecoms that things that should raise questions are often treated as the norm. A collection of spreadsheets, multiple suppliers, old contracts, unused services, complicated invoices and limited visibility into actual usage can become part of the background of running a business.
But telecoms has changed significantly. Businesses are more dependent on connectivity than ever before and telecoms environments have become larger, more fragmented and more closely tied to everyday operations. That makes the way telecoms is managed more important, not less so perhaps it’s time to question some of the things we have simply learned to live with.
“We’ve always done it this way.”
This might be one of the most expensive sentences in telecoms. A business may have had the same supplier relationships, processes and contracts for years. New services are added when they are needed, employees and sites come and go, technology changes and the business grows. Yet the underlying telecoms environment is often allowed to evolve without being properly reviewed.
The result is an environment that reflects the history of the business rather than what the business actually needs today.
A circuit that was essential five years ago may no longer be necessary. A mobile service may still be active even though the employee or business requirement it was created for has changed. A contract may have been renewed several times without anyone taking a fresh look at the terms, pricing or services being purchased.
There is nothing inherently wrong with keeping a supplier or renewing a contract but problems come in when we start assuming that because something has always been done a certain way, it must still be the right way to do it. Your telecoms environments should evolve alongside the business it supports.
“We’ll just check the invoice.”
Receiving an invoice and scanning through it is not the same as knowing whether the business is being charged correctly. With multiple services, contracts, suppliers, billing structures and pricing models involved, checking whether an invoice matches what was actually agreed on can become a significant exercise. And when the business is dealing with a large volume of telecoms services and suppliers, a manual review may only identify the most obvious discrepancies, not the ones hiding in the deeper details. This is where the distinction between paying telecom bills and managing telecom spend becomes important.
An invoice tells you what you have been charged but it doesn’t necessarily tell you whether you still need the service, whether the service is being used effectively, whether the contract remains commercially appropriate or whether the cost aligns with the businesses current requirements.
Businesses should have confidence that their telecoms spend is understood before the payment is approved, rather than only discovering discrepancies months or years later.
“Telecoms is just an IT problem.”
Telecoms and IT are closely connected but treating telecoms as something that sits entirely within the IT environment can often limit the conversation.
Telecoms affects finance, procurement, operations, security, employees, customers etc. and ultimately the business’s ability to function. Connectivity supports applications, cloud platforms, communication, remote working, customer interactions and many of the systems businesses rely on every day. That means that telecoms decisions can have consequences far beyond just the IT department.
The more important connectivity becomes to a business, the more important it becomes to manage their telecoms environment as a business environment rather than simply another technical function.
“Nobody really knows exactly what we have.”
This is perhaps the most concerning one. In many businesses, there is no single, reliable view of the entire telecoms environment. Information may be spread across supplier portals, invoices, contracts, spreadsheets, emails and internal systems and different departments may have different pieces of the puzzle, but nobody necessarily has the complete picture.
This fragmented view makes seemingly simple questions surprisingly difficult to answer.
How many services does the business actually have?
Which ones are active?
Which employees, branches or departments are using them?
What are the contractual commitments?
How much is being spent with each supplier?
Which services are underused?
Which contracts are approaching renewal?
If answering those questions requires several people to search through multiple different systems before compiling a spreadsheet, the business does not really have visibility. It has information and those are two very different things.
Good telecom management starts with knowing what exists.
“Telecoms is complicated, so there’s not much we can do about it.”
Businesses can have hundreds or thousands of services spread across different locations, suppliers and technologies. There can be different contracts, billing structures, service levels and usage patterns to manage but complexity should not be confused with a lack of control.
The more complicated an environment becomes, the more important it is to have the right processes, information and tools to manage it. This is where independent telecoms management can make a meaningful difference. An independent perspective allows the business to look at the entire environment rather than viewing it through the lens of a particular supplier or individual service.
A platform like Telegence can bring information together from different parts of a telecoms environment, giving businesses a more consolidated view of their spend, services, contracts and performance. This gives businesses the ability to make data-based decisions while having the full picture available, rather than trying to make a decision with bits of information existing on multiple different spreadsheets, systems, invoices etc.
The problem with normal
The danger of normalising these practices is that they stop being questioned.
A business may continue paying for services it no longer needs because nobody has challenged the requirement, a contract may continue to be renewed because renewal has become routine, an invoice may be approved because it looks broadly consistent with previous invoices. None of these decisions necessarily looks significant on their own but collectively they can create a telecoms environment that costs more, becomes harder to manage and provides less visibility than it should.
Telecoms has become too important to the modern business to be managed on assumptions and habits.
Just because something has become normal doesn’t mean it should remain normal.
