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• Data or query - sequence-neutral processing for fraud (31 March 2012) - When a fraudulent customer is identified and blocked, their next attempt at fraud won't necessarily start only after they're caught.

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Previous Columns

• Defend revenue in depth - Credit Assessment, Fraud and Credit Management (23 January 2010) - Credit checking, fraud management and credit management are three layers that defend a company's billing revenue.
• Managing the 'case' of alphanumeric keys and identifiers (20 July 2009) - Store case-sensitive identifiers in a form to support search, retrieval and transmission to downstream interfaces.
• Stretch Key Dimensions to See What Breaks (14 March 2009) - Any redesign will be cheaper whilst the design is still virtual, technical choices are not locked-in and the business data has yet to be stored in the repositories.
• Prune old data to constrain an application's size (22 February 2009) - Applying active pruning to an application's databases constrains an application's infrastructure to one proportional to the active customer base.
• Provide operational statistics to business users and support staff (14 December 2008) - By building a mechanism for reporting operational performance, business users can monitor their application's operational status themselves, and validate any performance and operational defects they uncover.
• Applications fail - design for ease of recovery (29 August 2008) - An application design that helps support staff limit problems' scope, identify their impact and resume normal processing will pay off.
• Managing outage processing through alternate landing zones (16 August 2008) - Decouple up and downstream interfaces by providing alternate locations for an application to receive and send its interface files.
• Architectures for future billing systems? (27 July 2008) - What could billing systems built from scratch today use as their base architecture in the areas of storage and computation?
• Improve System Deployments through Scripting (07 November 2007) - Conversion / migration steps of system deployments can be performed faster and more accurately by capturing details in an executable script that reduces or removes the human element to the processing.
• Key Dimensions of Scale in Billing (17 September 2007) - Key dimensions that drive a biller's system infrastructure, software and customer support needs will be affected as customer preferences, technology and product ranges change over time.
• How migration outages change over time (25 April 2007) - In the beginning, outages have greater impact on the older legacy system, but as the new (target) system holds more customers it is there where outages' impacts are felt the most.
• Performing billing in a HPC / cluster environment (25 February 2007) - Many functional domains in billing are suitable for HPC/cluster processing where transactions can be segmented into parallel streams and processed concurrently.
• Withhold and filter transactions to minimise operational impacts (21 January 2007) - Applications employing a transaction 'filter' function can assist operational processing by selectively removing and releasing transactions flowing across interfaces.
• Interconnect billing: a required competency for new entrants? (09 December 2006) - As new networks are connected, billers must address the issue of interconnect settlement, for both cost management and revenue enhancement.
• Three locations for billing's customer databases (29 July 2006) - Whether customer data is mastered in billing, customer care / front-of-house or held in a separate repository will depend on historic decisions and the will to break with the past.
• Four steps that defend a biller's revenue stream (04 June 2006) - Billable revenue is threatened by processing errors and customer behaviour - to moderate the risks involved, billers can apply credit checking, fraud monitoring, credit management, and revenue assurance.
• Using location to drive operational and migration processing (16 April 2006) - Geographic knowledge is an additional and often easily available determinant that can drive both operational and migration processing.
• Archiving billing data for the long-term (25 March 2006) - Billing systems generate, store and eventually archive high-volumes of transaction data to comply with corporate data retention policies, financial audits, and for use by surrounding business functions.
• Operational support levels differentiated by billing system needs (19 February 2006) - Differentiating support levels by billing instances allows billers to optimise their cost structures by tolerating higher levels of unplanned downtime (when it occurs), slower recovery times, and longer (slower) processing.
• Interconnect Billing and Reconciliation (23 January 2006) - Interconnect billing is a high volume, low margin and complex process requiring solutions that do not consume excessive margin through their operating costs. Interconnect bill reconciliation complements this by requiring low cost responses to validate incoming interconnect bills.
• Four common situations when replacing billing system software (08 January 2006) - Four common situations that must be addressed when legacy billing systems are replaced - these situations occur across industries (retail banking) and business functions (customer care).
• Reusing documented business rules for business benefit (11 December 2005) - Documented and available (locatable) business rules support billers' goals of offering uniform, accurate and (long-term) replaceable processing.
• Consolidating distributed data into a single customer view (13 November 2005) - Using customers' account and service relationships, their billing data can be consolidated into one touch point for all customer processing and inquiries.
• Migrating static and dynamic customer data separately (08 October 2005) - Migrations can complete faster when customers' slowly changing data is pre-migrated ahead of their dynamic data.
• Using A/B testing in billing processes (19 September 2005) - Continuous testing of selected billing processes can reduce operational costs, improve sales and retain customers by using customers' actual rather than perceived behaviour.
• Customer Transfers (Churn): internal, external, fast, and slow (03 September 2005) - Centralising and generalising the customer transfer (churn) process allows reuse across different networks and billing systems.
• The danger of 'price' in external interfaces (14 August 2005) - External interfaces containing 'price' fields can restrict future choices in bill processing.
• How RSS feeds could be used in billing (19 July 2005) - Billers could use RSS feeds externally to convey tailored information to individual customers, and internally to broadcast operational details to staff.
• Managed services - Revenue for services rendered (05 July 2005) - Large customers can pay their biller (or third party vendor) to perform business functions / services on their behalf. This can bind high-value customers to the biller's network by establishing tight linkages to the biller's operational systems.
• Contrasting pre-paid and post-paid billing (21 June 2005) - Whilst pre-paid and post-paid revenue are similar financially, different operational infrastructure and processing are required to support their billing.
• 'Long Tail' impacts on billing for digital businesses (05 June 2005) - 'The Long Tail' extends the support timescale for billing necessitating longer-term solutions.
• Third party revenue settlement (19 May 2005) - Billers selling content or displaying advertisements from business partners use a settlement process to share their revenue streams.
• When will an open source billing platform emerge? (05 May 2005) - As Open Source / Free Software moves from IT infrastructure into the application space, 'billing' will be a business function for which open source solutions are developed.
• Revenue Assurance: Iterative discovery and testing (12 April 2005) - Revenue assurance can use an iterative process to test the accuracy of a business' billing against its system documentation, business rule descriptions and data.
• Migration's functional triage (in four parts) (01 April 2005) - Not all of an existing system's functionality will be migrated to a new system, and new functional requirements must also be addressed.
• Billing transactions, not subscriptions (04 March 2005) - Businesses which have been transaction-based historically will find it easier to update their billing systems to include a competitor's subscription-based products than subscription-based businesses who must now learn how to bill individual transactions.
• Credit Management: Collecting the cash (14 February 2005) - Creating a bill is only half the work, the customer must also pay.
• Customer Payments (31 January 2005) - Customers and billers both influence the choices made when paying bills.
• Roaming on tollway and mobile networks (19 January 2005) - Roaming allow networks to be 'borrowed' for the convenience of customers and to the benefit of network providers.
• Five pricing models implemented through billing (02 January 2005) - Common pricing models are used across different industries to assign prices to transactions.
• Four algorithms that address most rating situations (19 September 2004) - Four key algorithms (flat rate, tiered, threshold and 'from / to') can be used to address the most business' rating needs. Once a charge's price has been determined, the remainder of billing can be performed using relatively similar processing.
• Reducing the complexity and hence costs of Rating (28 August 2004) - Making and keeping the rating process simple can minimise or reduce internal operational costs, decrease the time to market for new products, and allow customers to understand how they are charged.
• Mediation's support of differentiated charging (11 August 2004) - The preservation of network determinants and the supply of additional derived fields allows rating the widest opportunity to differentiate a customer's charges.
• Four directions of billing convergence (28 July 2004) - As the capabilities of devices and networks converge, so too are billing systems. Billing systems with increased capabilities provide billers with choices on how they market to customers. However convergence is not without its own problems.
• Seven approaches that can deliver more accurate Billing Cycles (14 July 2004) - Invoice defects can be reduced by validating data before and during billing, and by performing quality assurance tests on the resulting customer invoices before their distribution.
• Reusing the processes of billing migration (30 June 2004) - High-level design and planning of billing system migrations can identify opportunities for reuse and describe the deployment order of migration capabilities.
• How to passively migrate transitory data (16 June 2004) - Rather than migrating all data from an old application at once, allow transitory data to be extracted gradually.
• How ready is your billing data? (02 June 2004) - In the billing domain, rating-, pricing- and invoice-ready interfaces can support the introduction of new rating platforms, as well as alternative approaches to application migration and consolidation.
• Reduce migration impacts by merging outbound interfaces (20 May 2004) - Hiding upstream change from downstream applications reduces the overall impact, cost and complexity of a migration.
• VoIP - Not good enough... yet. (28 April 2004) - Today, VoIP may not be the appropriate choice for the mass-market, but that day is coming... soon.
• You have just 52 weekends in a year! (21 April 2004) - A year's weekends can be reserved by regular operational activities - data migrations will complicate your planning.
• Processing dimensions influence throughput and ability to scale (14 April 2004) - Understanding how billing or migration processing varies based on its parameters assists operational planning.
• Billing is Everywhere (07 April 2004) - Billing is a function common to many businesses, this column describes how with some examples

Tags: Billing, Networks, Migration, Rating, Pricing