Operations and Innovations

Operations and innovations: how do operations affect the company – are operations strategic or tactical?

The word ‘operations’ conjures up the image of back office – functions that the company has to perform, but which don’t necessarily affect customers directly. Rightly or wrongly, it is considered that for corporate operations such as finance, the best that can be expected is that they can be delivered at optimal cost – that is, these are ‘cost’ centers not profit centers.

But in communications, operations is different.

In communications, operations is the production center of the company. Operations is the factory floor – the part of the company concerned with delivering products. In communications, operations can affect profitability in two ways:

• Firstly, making products faster and more efficiently is important to cutting costs. Operations is undergoing a seismic change as the industry moves from mostly manual processes to automated ‘flow-through’ provisioning. Operations support systems ( OSS) must be able to support automation – and this is achievable where operations takes an inventory-centric approach.
• Secondly, the ability to innovate by creating products that combine capability in new ways gives customers products that more closely meet their needs, and thereby give communications service providers new ways to raise new revenues. Operations support systems ( OSS) software can enable innovation through flexible construction and combination of services – or they can act as a barrier to innovation through inflexible processes and structures.