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  • Reporting “The Smart Way” in RA

    Reporting “The Smart Way” in RA

    “As is”
    Read the news using your favorite news app on your smart phone or device? Notice how the app renders news items that are important to you or of interest to you and stacks them together with short headlines followed by a short summary thereby making sure that one wouldn’t need to feel short of time finding what really needs to be read.

    Is this done in your RA department?

    The below diagram illustrates how majority of the RA departments report the necessary information to all concerned departments and how the subsequent action items are publicized and owned by various departments.

    Reporting2

    In majority of RA functions the following gaps exist in the reporting of findings and their subsequent action points:

    • Reports rarely designed with specific information that is immediately consumable by target audience
    • Reports rarely designed with specific requirements to the target audience than can be easily converted to action items
    • Majority of the RA operations use one reporting template for all business functions

    “Smart Reporting”
    The below figure illustrates the ideal modus operandi that requires to be followed in a RA reporting structure.

    Reporting1

    Key improvements in the model are as follows:
    • Reports specifically designed to target audience. For example: Reports to CxO will address revenue & cost savings, key mitigation measures taken, not exceed a time length of 5 minutes and requiring specific actions / escalations
    • All reports to address specific actions required from various business functions and will be time bound
    • Organizational news feeds will be made part of RA reporting

    Here the emphasis is on smart reporting, which can be quickly consumed and acted upon.

  • Digital Transformation for telcos 2015-2020

    Digital Transformation for telcos 2015-2020

    I’m delighted to be speaking at Subex’s User Conference in Prague in October.

    For the last 10 years I’ve been researching and promoting new business models for the telecoms industry. This type of innovation is now more important than ever, as pressures on the existing business model get stronger and stronger.

    Trying to grow when markets are saturated, when there is greater competition from new players and regulators are less benign is very difficult using traditional approaches.

    All my clients are struggling with this growth challenge and, more broadly, how they stay relevant in the fast evolving ‘digital economy’.

    The answer is to start by more fully understanding how the digital economy is playing out and what approaches and business/operating models work best when there is abundant connectivity and powerful new technologies available at low cost.

    In my talk, I’ll be covering the topics below with the aim of stimulating a vibrant discussion on the practicalities of creating a new growth story for telcos:

    • Macro context for digital transformation: The ‘Industrial Internet of Things’ – far bigger impact on society than the consumer internet. How do telcos need to prepare to enable this?
    • Business model innovation in the digital economy – lessons from digital native organisations like Apple, Alibaba, Amazon, Salesforce, Xiaomi and others.
    • New role for telcos to enable local digital economies – creating the next wave of growth, beyond connectivity
    • Telco transformation – learning from the worst and the best practices of Western telcos.
    • Key Challenges and how to overcome them: technology, culture, organization, metrics.
    • Roadmap to creating a ‘Digital DNA’: quick wins and strategic investments

    As a pre-read, you may be interested in an article I wrote recently for research firm, Analysys Mason, which describes the business model evolution that’s needed for telcos:

    https://www.analysysmason.com/About-Us/News/Newsletter/telcos-platforms-Jun2015/

    I look forward to meeting participants at Subex’s event in October. In the meantime, if you have any questions or ideas, do get in touch: simontorrance1940@gmail.com

  • It’s in the DNA

    It’s in the DNA

    Last year the 100th anniversary of a profound scientific achievement which shaped the modern world went by completely unnoticed by the general public. It was 100 years ago that the physicists William and Lawrence Bragg shot x-rays through various crystallized substances and were able to decipher the resulting diffraction patterns to reveal their hidden atomic structure. For that discovery they won the Nobel Prize and the science of X-Ray crystallography was born, a technique which now underpins almost all modern science, from medicine through to astronomy. Crystallography has been used to reveal the chemical composition of penicillin, insulin, Vitamin B12 and, more recently, the Mars rover Curiosity is utilizing the CheMin instrument for detecting the chemical composition of the Martian soil. Perhaps one of crystallography’s greatest triumphs started with Photo 51, the nickname given to the image Rosalind Franklin took of the DNA molecule back in 1952, and which was subsequently used by Watson and Crick to unravel the double helix structure of DNA. DNA is often described as the blueprint of life, since it contains all the instructions by which living creatures are built.

    The discoveries of pioneers like Bragg, Franklin, Watson and Crick are inspiration for those who are fascinated by finding the data patterns that reveal what’s hidden beneath. Like the X-rays of crystallography the Subex ROC RA product can see through the B/OSS by automatically analysing inputs and outputs to reveal, report and even auto-correct the hidden misalignments and other issues within. Issues which can lose a company millions overnight.

    Now ROC RA has also taken Revenue Assurance a quantum leap forward by introducing DNA. DNA provides the building blocks to automatically audit data streams from throughout an organisation and reduces the configuration effort drastically. The predefined blocks of DNA code can be used to rapidly build up the system topology and reconcile the data and interfaces thorough simple point and click selection of modules. Any adjustments or enhancements to the audit processes can be quickly made through a highly intuitive graphical interface. DNA templates cover Prepaid, Post Paid, Interconnect, Roaming, Content and many others traffic types from almost 100% of known switches, mediation and billing systems.

    Coupled with DNA are powerful new visualization and analytics capabilities that let you forecast how KPI will change over time, correlate KPI, apply what if modelling and alert you long before issues get critical. ROC RA lets you incorporate those KPI and alerts into a built-in model of your business so that the right information is channeled to the right person at the right time. You decide what level of detail you want and how and where you want to see it, be it by email, mobile dashboard, SMS or desktop dashboard.

    DNA now makes ROC RA even easier to use than ever and will make the picture of what’s really happening in your business crystal clear.

  • Getting Closer to a Reliable FAR

    Getting Closer to a Reliable FAR

    OK finance teams, time to come out of the shadows.  At most operators with whom I have worked, the focus of enterprise data quality efforts has been on optimizing network operations.  Misalignment between the network and data in systems that support planning, provisioning, activation and service assurance adds friction and cost to essential telco processes.  No new insight here.

    Lately I’ve been spending more time with the finance guys.   Despite stereotypes to the contrary, they’re not just number crunchers.  They care about what’s in the network- where it is, how old it is, the condition it’s in, where it’s been, where it’s going and what happens at end of life.  Complicating their lives, the financial database of record for network assets, the Fixed Asset Register (FAR), typically suffers from the same data issues confounding the Ops teams—if not worse.

    Sounds bad, but Finance doesn’t have to worry about delivering or supporting new services.  So what’s the harm?   Based on the earful I’ve received from finance organizations, including a Tier 1 CFO—plenty.  This diagram provides a sampling of corporate functions dependent upon accurate asset records in the FAR:

    Mission Critical Role of the FAR

    Among the potential costs of inaccurate fixed asset records are:

    • Improper calculation of depreciation
    • Failure to identify impaired assets and candidates for accelerated write-downs
    • Overpayment of property taxes
    • Overpayment of insurance premiums
    • Restatement of past financial results
    • Risk of regulatory penalties
    • Exposure to fraud, theft and asset mismanagement cases

    Such issues get corporate board-level attention.  I am aware of several recent cases of poor FAR audit results prompting an operator to launch a FAR cleanup effort or even a full asset management program.

    To their credit, financial reporting analysts I have spoken with are not blind to their data woes—just typically dependent upon compromises and work-arounds.  They often manage as best they can by mining numerous B/OSS’s to cobble together a view of assets across all network layers and asset classes.  Gaps and inaccuracies in this view abound.

    Among the most common methods finance organizations employ to address the situation are manual audits performed on sample sites once or twice a year.   This mostly provides insights on how far off the FAR is from reality.  Generally, such spot audits are too limited and expensive to support systemic and continuous correction of the errant data.

    So how do we achieve a reliable FAR (before the Board takes it up as a crusade)?

    It starts with determining the impact of inaccurate asset records on financial reporting and planning, corporate governance, taxation and regulatory compliance.  Is the exposure minimal and bounded, or are the risks unacceptable?  Assuming the latter, a FAR get-well plan should include:

    • Data acquisition methods for both active and passive network assets that use the network itself as a source versus other systems
    • Comparison of this data to the FAR and reconciliation of errors
    • A permanent mechanism to keep the FAR aligned with the changing network so the data stays clean
    • Commensurate process enhancements and guardrails to reinforce automated approaches—which can never guarantee 100% accuracy on their own

    When tightly aligned with the network, the FAR becomes more than a reporting tool, it can become a strategic enabler for Capex optimization.

  • Service Orientated Architecture – A Balance of Form and Function

    Service Orientated Architecture – A Balance of Form and Function

    The concept of form following function was at the heart of modernist Bauhaus architecture in the early 20th century and, according to Wikipedia, extols the principle that…

    “…the shape of a building or object should be primarily based upon its intended function or purpose.”

    The phrase ‘form ever follows function’ was actually coined as long ago as 1896 by American architect Louis Sullivan, although the concept stretches back all the way to the Roman architect Marcus Vitruvius Pollio who asserted in the 1st century BC that structures should exhibit the qualities of being “solid, useful and beautiful”.

    In contrast to the modernist architecture of buildings, architecture of enterprise software is frequently guided more by engineering constraints than the needs of a business.  Functional requirements are gathered but are often implemented in ways which are more optimal for engineering than for the business processes they are meant to support.  The result is that business processes must be made to fit with the form of the software, rather than the software fitting the function of the business.  The software becomes like a strait jacket on the business which prevents it from adapting or being able to react to external conditions.

    However, innovations in enterprise architecture are freeing software to mould itself to the business processes in ways not possible a few years ago.  A system built using a modern Service Orientated Architecture (SOA) is comprised of discrete, loosely coupled modules that can communicate with each other without human intervention.

    The Open Groups definition of SOA is:

    Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) is an architectural style that supports service-orientation.

    Service-orientation is a way of thinking in terms of services and service-based development and the outcomes of services.

    They go on to say that the SOA Architectural style

    “…is based on the design of the services – which mirror real-world business activities – comprising the enterprise (or inter-enterprise) business processes”

    By modularising the code, providing standardised interfaces (API’s) and adopting standard communication protocols, such as web service calls using SOAP,  it’s possible for features and functions to be re-combined in endless ways to support a variety of different applications.  SOA also provides a way to organically grow functionality in an iterative way.  By adopting an agile software development methodology developers can design, built and test modules that support small units of business process a piece at a time.  Since the modules are self-contained they can be re-used and re-combined with other modules to reduce development effort.  Maintenance costs are also reduced since single modules can be swapped in and out with a minimum of disruption.

    By adopting a modular service orientated architecture software developers can now at last follow the principles first laid down by Vitruvius and create solutions that fit business processes beautifully.

  • Key is to ask the ‘right questions’

    Key is to ask the ‘right questions’

    “In school, we’re rewarded for having the answer, not for asking a good question”

    This quote from Richard Saul Wurman rightly describes how a normal human mind, as part of it’s social development process, adapts to the guidelines of “finding the answers”, rather than exploring the possibilities of asking the “right questions”.

    And this mindset also reflects in our place of work. We are humanly tailored to explore satisfaction in having answers to all the questions. And in the process of being ‘answer ready’, we tend to become left brain heavy than the right. We become target driven and focus less and less on fresh set of questions which could challenge us further to drive improvement and innovation.

    Fraud Management ‘function’ is no different. Being a ‘revenue protection’ function in a large ‘organization’ it is expected to act similar to a small, but important organ in human body.
    Like hormone levels of an organ, health of an FM function is also measured in terms of subjective financial targets – either monthly, quarterly or yearly. And the corrective action starts when the achievements are found to be ‘less than optimum’.

    But, as an experienced doctor would say – It’s the lifestyle you need to keep in check and not hormone levels to remain healthy!
    Constant self-assessing questions such as – “Am I eating right ?”, “Am I sleeping right ?”, “Am I sitting right ?”, “Am I exercising right ?” etc. go a long way in guaranteeing you a healthy life. Periodic check-ups then becomes a method to confirm your good health rather than just means to detect illness or deficiencies.

    Keeping healthy is a continuous process – be it human body or fraud management. It is actually a practice, than just a function.
    And to setup a continuously improving fraud practice in your organization it is essential to keep asking relevant & timely questions across the following 8 pillars of this practice:

    • Influence
    • Organization
    • People
    • Process
    • Tools
    • Knowledge Management
    • Coverage
    • Continuous Improvement

    While the questions could be an organization, risk or region specific, I personally always start with the following:

    Influence:

    • Is our FM function on a driver seat or secondary role and working as a support function ?
    • How should we enhance the influence of our FM function ?
    • How do we keep showcasing enhanced value from FM function ?
    • How do we extend our internal & external interfacing and make the existing interfacing stronger ?

    Organization:

    • How do we ensure fraud awareness keeps pace with the upgrading business dynamics ?
    • How do we enhance internal & external collaboration with FM function ?
    • How do we get higher return of investment from FM function ?
    • How to further reduce the fraud impact on the bottom line ?
    • How to make our fraud management practice more proactive ?

    People:

    • Is resource acquisition better or resource development ?
    • How do we safeguard ourselves from attrition ?
    • Is our team structure agile enough while following industry standards ?
    • Do we have all the required roles and are the responsibilities clearly defined ?
    • Are we right, under or over staffed ?

    Process:

    • Are my processes effective and easily exercisable ?
    • Are my processes future ready ?
    • Are my processes agile enough to adapt to any changes with acceptable TAT ?
    • Are we adopting and implementing industry best practices ?
    • What parts of my processes can be automated ?

    Tools:

    • Is the Fraud Management tool adapted to my business environment ?
    • How do I ensure that the FM tool is fed accurate, complete and timely data ?
    • Are my fraud controls effective & efficient ? How do I reduce false positives ?
    • How do I ensure 100% automated fraud risk coverage ?
    • What capabilities do we need to acquire on tool front to be future ready ?
    • Are we ready against enormous data surge likely to be seen over next few years ? How do we benefit from it ?
    • Are we constantly learning from the industry in terms of fraud detection & prevention methods ?

    Knowledge Management:

    • Is there sufficient attention on upgrading to the required skill sets ?
    • How do we enhance resource competency & knowledge against current & future services ?
    • Is our team keeping pace with constant fraud mutations ?
    • Is our team using the tools effectively & efficiently ?
    • Is our team knowledgeable and comfortable with processes ?
    • What are the top 5 areas of learning for the whole fraud function ?

    Coverage:

    • Are we aware of all the fraud risks we are exposed to ? What is our current coverage levels ?
    • Do we know the gaps in terms of fraud risks coverage ? How can we improve ?
    • What is our strategy to become compliant to fraud risks introduced by new products and services ?
    • Are we ready for fast converging cross industry environment and the risks it introduces ?
    • What is our stand on customer and partner only risks ? How relevant they are for our business ? Is our current stand obsolete ?

    Continuous Improvement:

    • What is our performance management strategy ?
    • Do we have effective KPIs ? Are these business relevant ?
    • How can we improve the fraud function’s effectiveness & maturity continuously ?
    • What metrics should I use to measure health of the overall FM function ?
    • Are we conducting sufficient & periodic RCA & decision analysis ?
    • How do we gather accumulated wisdom & actionable intelligence for improvement ?

    Each of these questions can be a healthy point of discussion within your organization.
    While these may give you a first hand view of health of your current fraud practice, more importantly, it may also open doors for a much detailed open table introspective sessions, enabling you to come up with much better & effective questions.

    Remember, the key to remain healthy is to keep asking the ‘right’ questions.

    As Albert Einstein rightly said – “If I had an hour to solve a problem and my life depended on the solution, I would spend the first 55 minutes determining the proper question to ask, for once I know the proper question, I could solve the problem in less than five minutes.”

  • Plain Sailing on a Sea of Data

    Plain Sailing on a Sea of Data

    Running a business can be like sailing a ship.  It’s not enough to set a course and expect the ship to just get there.  The sea can be rough, the weather unpredictable, and just under the surface there may be hidden obstacles. Any number of problems can push you off course, or, at worst, sink your ship completely.  A sea of data washes around the business which can either drag you under, or carry you swiftly to your destination.  So what can you do to ensure a safe arrival at your destination?  The following checklist will help you get ready for your journey.

    A strong ship

    You will need a ship that can sail in all weathers, and has a reliable track record for sailing long distances.

    Subex has a pedigree of providing enterprise strength software to the telecoms industry for over 20 years. Subex ROC can crunch billions of call records daily

    A clear destination

    Without an agreed destination your business will drift aimlessly and will eventually run aground.  By setting clear objectives everyone can work together to ensure the ship stays the course.

    Subex consultants can help to plan for your voyage and set a course for you planned destination. Subex Analytics help to keep a business on course by using historic data to predict which direction a business is heading.

    A good map

    Your map is your business strategy, but this shouldn’t be set in stone.  A business strategy must adapt to the changing conditions and business leaders must remain vigilant to make course corrections when necessary.

    Subex ROC provides has a modularised framework that can be quickly adapted to handle new challenges or changes in course.  The course to follow can be mapped out in KPIs that provide constant visual feedback to inform you if your business goes off course.

    A navigator who knows the way

    Pick the right currents your ship will be carried quickly to your destination, but getting caught by the wrong ones can set you miles off course.  A business embarking on a journey into the unknown needs an experienced navigator to guide the way.

    Subex consultants have the experience to guide a corporation across open water or narrow straits of competition, regulatory requirements and market demands.

    As soon as sailors began to navigate beyond the sight of land then they realised they needed more than just the stars to find their way. Compasses, Nautical maps, sextants and marine chronometers all advanced the quality of analytics available to navigators, but until radar, LORAN and GPS arrived in the late 20th century sailors still relied largely upon dead reckoning and gut instinct to find the way, and their journeys would often end tragically.  Now Subex analytics can provide the same kind of objective view of where a business is heading that GPS provides for sailors.  Subex analytics can see through the fog and turbulent waves of data that flood into an organisation and threaten to knock you off course.  Using advanced time series forecasting, correlation, what if modelling, and pin sharp visualisations Subex ROC can navigate through a sea of data and help to steer your business safely to its planned destination.

  • Big Data and the Zettabyte

    Big Data and the Zettabyte

    The industry buzzwords and focus around Big Data Management are starting to wane in the media, but should it?

    Consider this: In 2015, the internet is expected to carry over a Zettabyte of data for the first time ever. Even more interesting…and alarming…is that by 2020, forecasts are calling for upwards of 35 Zettabytes, per year (!), to be carried. If Big Data were a round of golf, and we as an industry thought we were somewhere around the 2nd or 3rd hole, in reality, we haven’t even purchased our clubs yet.

    For those of you not familiar with a Zettabyte, here is the breakdown:
    1000 Terabytes = Petabyte
    1000 Petabytes = Exabyte
    1000 Exabytes = Zettabyte

    Mobile video data alone has increased over 3500% since 2010; statistics abound for data growth – and they all point to explosive growth continuing. With the advent of 4G, raising data speeds and volumes by an order of magnitude, we now see 5G appearing by 2017 in some markets – again raising the volumes and speeds by yet another order of magnitude. Everything in our lives is being connected. Cars, appliances, our bodies (and embedded equipment to run them, e.g., pacemakers), every shop and street corner (video), and even the air, the water currents, and the space surrounding our immediate planet, are all feeding data in increasing volumes and depths into our collective networks. What does this mean?

    It means, quite simply, that we haven’t even begun to understand what Big Data is and how it will impact us. It also means that the communications industry, and the backbone it supports, has a long way to go (as the default host for much of this data) to be prepared.

  • A Digital Future for Everyone

    A Digital Future for Everyone

    Baroness Martha lane Fox, Internet pioneer and co-founder of lastminute.com,  has recently launched a campaign to try raise public and government awareness as to how the internet can benefit everyone, rather than just being a corporate billboard for advertising.   It is entitled DOT EVERYONE, a play on the .com extension used by commercial websites.

    As a business women in the late 90’s Baroness Fox realised the potential of the internet to provide an economical channel through which services could be delivered directly to the public.  Lastminute.com thrived on scooping up the unsold seats for holidays and west end shows and making them immediately available to the public with an easy to use search engine.  It was a business model that was uniquely suited to the internet, since it dealt with a data product that would become obsolete very quickly and targeted a geographically disparate market.  The internet provided the perfect channel through which such a product could be made available to a huge market in the minimum of time.  It is now Europe’s largest travel and leisure website.

    Today she is working to enlighten the British government and public as to how those characteristics of the internet that lastminute.com exploited could also serve the public good.  Her DOT EVERYONE campaign has three key strands

    1. To help educate all of us, from all walks of life, about the internet. The internet is the organising principle of our age, touching all our lives, every day. As the late activist Aaron Swartz put it, “It’s not OK not to understand the Internet anymore”.
    2. To put women at the heart of the technology sector. Currently there are fewer women in the digital sector than there are in Parliament.
    3. We (the British government) should aim for a much more ambitious global role in unpicking the complex moral and ethical issues that the internet presents.

    While these messages were aimed primarily at UK government, they are really aspirations that should apply equally to governments everywhere. In this blog I am looking at the first of those messages.  In order to “educate all of us”, it is essential that good internet services are made available to all of us.  Baroness Fox goes on to say

    “We need to make sure that those in power understand how the internet can help us redefine public services, improve the lives of the most vulnerable, bolster our economy.” 

    Key to this redefinition of public services is the usability of government websites.  By improving the usability of websites it is hoped many more interactions with government will happen as self-service transactions, resulting in substantial cost savings.  A good user experience can result in improved quality of service for much lower cost.   In a letter written to the government in 2010 Fox states

    “It seems to me that the time is now to use the Internet to shift the lead in the design of services from the policy and legal teams to the end users.”

    In other words, governments must cut through red tape and design services around user needs.

    Along with improving the quality of transactions on government websites it is also recommended that services should be made available through API’s such that external organisations can directly utilise government services, as well as making them more widely available to re-sellers.

    “We should put government transactional services and content where people spend their time on the web, rather than always expecting them to go to Directgov.” (government website)

    By exposing API’s to third party vendors then not only are external companies able to directly interface to those services, but they also able to offer them on to other consumers, thereby extending the reach of the service providers.  For example, Ebay and Facebook often carry ads for third party organisations that post their content via the Ebay and Facebook API’s.

    A third recommendation is that services should be centralised through a single portal.  This will improve ease of access, but will also result in removing duplication.

    The recommendations that Baroness Fox has made are already making a substantial difference to how consumers interact with government, and will continue to drive government to improve services and embrace the digital age.  In the words of Baroness Fox

    “What digital is about, what the internet allows, is a radical redesign of services. Cheaper, better, faster.”

    It’s a revolution that affects everyone.

  • Making the Connection

    Making the Connection

    risk of congestion

    It’s 7AM and I can’t put off getting up any longer, so I look out the window and see there’s a light frost on the grass, which the weather channel warned me about 3 days ago. An hour later I’m at the train station waiting for the 7:42 which is delayed because the frost has caused the points to seize up in a town 50 miles away, so now the entire South East rail system is completely snarled up. They predicted the weather and probably knew there would be a point’s failure, but still the network crashed. So I need to phone work to let them know I’m going to be late, but I can’t connect. Thousands of other commuters around me are also trying to phone ahead, but the network can’t handle it. It seems to happen every day.

    We are surrounded by events which are beyond our control, but often they happen in predictable ways. The points failure was perhaps less predictable than my alarm, but we always knew that when the temperature dropped there would be some kind of failure somewhere that would lead to cancellations and a breakdown of the network. We always knew that rush hour would become an agonising crawl into town on overcrowded trains. The congestion could probably have been avoided if they could have predicted which parts of the network were under the most stress and the impact on the network in the event of failure or congestion at those stress points. Additional resources could then be provided at those points, or alternative routes planned to bypass the congestion and limit the ripple out effect, like a fire break.  The problem is only likely to get worse, and the network more unreliable, as the population increases and more people than ever rely on the rail network to get to work.

    With the arrival of LTE and rapidly increasing popularity of Video on Demand then telecoms networks are also facing increasing levels of congestion and instability. Global data traffic is predicted to increase by 10 to 20 times by 2019 (Cisco).   In order to meet regulatory obligations and maintain customer experience Capex is set to spiral upwards. MNOs, who are already facing a year on year decrease in ARPU, will struggle to keep pace with demand and the risk of congestion will be ever present.

    As with rail networks MNOs need a longer term strategy in place to understand where and when future choke points in the network will occur so that the risk of congestion can be eliminated for the least cost. Subex Capacity Management provides the capability to predict these points of congestion by monitoring and correlating metrics from across the network to provide detailed forecasts of network utilisation. Additional factors can be brought into the forecasts, such as the impact of major events or the rolling out of M2M services and different scenarios played out to understand how the network will respond. By automating the forecasting process network managers can be alerted long before issues become critical and congestion begins to occur. They can evaluate different options for either re-homing traffic or augmenting the network for the least possible cost. Stranded or un-utilised assets can even be recovered and re-located to satisfy demand for very little cost.

    CFOs need to find ways to keep increasing revenue while controlling costs, and CTOs need to keep network delivering ever greater speeds as volumes of traffic increase exponentially.  Both need to look into the future to avoid a future of network instability, falling quality, crippling network costs and lost revenue.