With ecosystem-based business becoming the norm, there are a multitude of opportunities for revenue to seep through the cracks, whether intentionally (fraud) or not (leakage). As organizations transform to meet the needs of the connected digital economy, business must be assured, future-proofed, and rooted across the operational processes, systems and data of the organization and ecosystem.
The Business Assurance project revisits well established functions such as revenue assurance, fraud management, charging, billing and settlement, etc., as well as new areas such as transformation assurance and ecosystem assurance for the IoE & digital business context.
The complexity of partnerships and emerging business models brings with it new opportunities for revenue generation, but also for leakage and fraud, meaning that successful processes now need to be reinvented and updated with the use of new technologies and an open, collaborative approach.
The program also highlights the importance of business assurance, not only in monetization, but also in generating and maintaining trust across the ecosystem and among end-users, as well as contributing to providing overall customer satisfaction and loyalty.
Business Assurance Report 2021
The revenue assurance program has evolved and extended its scope to Business Assurance which integrates assurance and risk management disciplines, into a data-centric, pro-active assurance umbrella framework with the goal to continuously protect and improve financial integrity, and enhance business value and customer experience. This new business assurance survey demonstrates how this concept is evolving across the telecommunications industry.
This report provides BA practitioners with valuable facts and community reflections, as well as detailed observations. For BA practitioners, it is worthwhile to deep dive question by question and to study it chart by chart.
Get involved across a number of initiatives:
Revenue Assurance Program
Developing revenue assurance best practices to support digital services
Fraud Management Program
Tailoring the Fraud Management Maturity Model to digital services
Asset Management Program
Optimizing the value gained from assets through their lifecycle
Charging & Billing Program
Discussion around the perspective and needs of digital services
TM Forum Business Assurance Manifesto
The participants in the TM Forum open innovation initiative on business assurance, in the context of IoT and the digital, connected economy, agree on the following initial scope and principles of the business assurance (BA) initiative.
The overall goal of the BA initiative is to establish, in a collaborative manner, BA best practices that will improve customer experience and business performance. The following high level goals have been defined to assure the digital evolution journey of companies:
- Core business assurance (Function)
- Assure profit maximization and value chains
- Provide value chain insights/visibility, using data analytics, to improve services and automation
- Transformation/ Migration assurance (Organization)
- Assure customer experience during change and transformation
- Facilitate decision making on risk and assurance topics
- Ecosystem assurance (Industry)
- Assure digital services so that they work from day one and generate money
- Protect and contribute to digital growth
The following cross-area BA capabilities are considered essential capabilities within any organization:
- Automated tools to monitor the flow of data and money across value chains
- Detailed and data-driven risk management
- Detailed insights into issue resolution including root-causes
- Cross-domain access to and knowledge of data analytics practices
- A centre of excellence for proactive assurance and facilitation
These capabilities will be explored, enhanced and strategically placed to fulfill the above stated high-level BA goals.
For business assurance to be effective, guiding principles will be defined, applied and expanded by the team. These principles currently include:
- BA will create and protect the value of new digital and connected services – “assurance by design”
- BA will become embedded in decision making processes
- BA will facilitate the continual optimization of business performance
- BA will facilitate continual improvement and monetization
- BA will facilitate the generation and maintenance of trust across ecosystems whilst balancing risk and reward for stakeholders
