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Management of communication services and cloud services is increasingly challenging and probably the most dynamic element to managing the modern digital workforce. Between keeping up with new technologies, working with multiple carriers and cloud service providers (CSPs), handling complex contracts, and processing substantial quantities of Moves, Adds, Changes, and Disconnects (MACDs), to various unified communication services and subscriptions to on-demand CSP applications and infrastructure makes it’s easy to become overwhelmed. Meanwhile, enterprises are under increasing pressure to reduce costs while efficiently delivering more value via the adoption of the latest breakthrough digital service.

You’re probably familiar with the famous adage attributed to the late renowned management theorist Peter Drucker, “you can’t manage what you can’t measure.” These are wise words that guide business managers of all stripes, and they apply exceptionally well to enterprises facing the challenge of managing their ever-growing digital workforce that can operate at any time and from anywhere they have network access.

By empowering your service managers with visibility into how their employees consumer the full spectrum of digital services, you gain the insight you need to optimize your technology investments properly.  As a result, many CSPs and UCaaS providers have enabled self-service fulfillment. Streamlining the workflow steps does not eliminate the need for organizations to sustain an accurate information architecture that can measure what, where, when and how services are deployed and by whom.

The Importance of Monitoring and Measuring Service Delivery

There are several common factors that cause organizations to fall behind in effectively managing their contracted services that can often change without any centralized coordination.  A few examples include – keeping track of carrier and CSP invoices, maintaining ownership and deployment of inventory in conjunction with the continual service delivery and support activities like provisioning and incident management. Adding and removing features and services often occurs within silos or even by self-service empowered individuals across organizations. Lack of coordination and automated updates to a unified information architecture database that provides secure logically partitioned access to all cost center managers can lead to:

• Increased cost due to lack of holistic visibility on how services are deployed and used
• Paying for unused services
• Insufficient systems to maintain accurate inventory
• The inability to assign financial management and accurately manage chargebacks
• Reacting and mitigating the broad spectrum of compliance issues derived from inadequate policy management

Secondly, the speed of modern business and the frequent changes it demands makes it easy to fall behind without proper tools to automate workflow and ensure policy enforcement. MACDs, an integral element of traditional Telecom Expense Management, can prove to be particularly challenging. Changes in end-user service capabilities can quickly add up. This can lead to mistakes, hidden overcharges, and money wasted on unused services.

For enterprises to manage MACDs, their business needs typically include:

• Automating the lifecycle of an order whether it goes through a central service delivery team or enabled via self-service from timestamp point of request through to provisioning and deployment
• Managing an automated approval process for any type of standard end-user request
• Facilitating real-time visibility into all in-flight orders that may result in inventory changes
• Ensuring the results of service and configuration changes, including expected invoice charges are automatically updated in the enterprise’s central securely shared information architecture database
• Measuring the results of configuration changes in a dynamic and ever-changing environment

Monitoring work order transactions and managing changes to service inventory are key steps into optimizing payments for all contracted services. Tracking work orders in real time provides a clear and complete snapshot of changes to your deployed services across the enterprise, which can help reduce inaccuracies. Confirming that your inventory is up-to-date provides the necessary insight to compare services against invoices, ensuring that you’re only paying for the services used.

Managing Your Greater Telecom Environment

Accurate management of your service inventory can be a tedious multi-facet process since it encompasses monitoring and measuring the types of services, where they are installed, the related charges and who has financial responsibility. Managing the dynamics of frequent MACD transactions and automatically updating the configuration of service inventory is an integral component of an overall Telecom Expense Management solution. TEM provides technology that supports the entire request, approval and order process with automated workflows.

An Inventory Management component of a TEM solution offers a centralized database of all communication services, making it easy to understand what services you have, where they are located, what vendors provide the services, and how much they cost. Institutionalizing a structured TEM program supported by industry proven technology is the only practical means to maintain an intuitive and accurate holistic real-time perspective required to measure and therefore manage the full spectrum of services needed to empower the enterprise digital workforce.

Managing your digital assets in a TEM solution is one critical component to managing the pieces of your operational portfolio. It’s imperative that your TEM solution can combine and intuitively transform all the pieces of your puzzle into meaningful, actionable information. This is where embedded guided analytic applications help managers become strategic enablers for their organizations by helping executives and cost center managers identify trends and anomalies that can help them run and grow their business operations.

“You can’t manage what you can’t measure,” or put another way, “what gets measured, gets managed.” Those words of Peter Drucker still ring true today, especially for managing the full spectrum of enterprise communications and cloud services. From tracking MACDs to utilizing embedded BI, tools proper management of the modern digital workforce becomes a strategic enabler.

When properly managed, organizations can optimize their technology investments, streamline workflow operations and reduce internal staff demands. This helps organizations become more proactive and strategic when implementing technology for positive continual growth while providing them with a competitive advantage.

To learn about how Calero’s Communication Lifecycle Management approach can help you better measure and manage your communications, read our brochure on Simplified Communications Management.