Barbara Bonner is an expert at OSS project planning and implementation. She’s a 24-year telecom industry veteran and a former general manager of billing at AT&T.

Barbara began her telecom career in sales. She worked in the business call center at Bell Telephone of Pennsylvania, and eventually moved up to Account Manager positions at AT&T. 

From there her career shifted dramatically to the system and project development side.

In 1993, she moved to support customer care operations and systems-planning for WorldNet, AT&T's entry into Internet services.  She was responsible for re-engineered processes, launching billing operations, and participated in 18 rapid product launches.  And her team was also the first at AT&T to introduce off-the-shelf billing software for business services.

In early 2000, Barbara left AT&T to work for an international carrier where she’s once again filling a major billing-systems role across both retail and wholesale billing environments.  At her new company she primarily serves as a liaison between operations, development, and product groups.

Her Expert Briefing will give you a wonderful, multi-disciplinary understanding of the business and technical challenges that large carrier organizations face.  You’ll enjoy the interesting, thought- provoking way she describes the roles of different industry players.  

This Is How You’ll Be Helped By This Road Warrior Briefing #5:

It’s impossible to overestimate either the importance of billing or the changes this function has gone through in the past decade. 

It is no less than the most important customer interface available to carriers. Do it well, and you’ve laid a firm foundation for customer retention and new service acceptance. Do it badly, and you’ll dig a hole for yourself that you’ll be trying to scramble out of for months or years to come.

This Expert Briefing explains the wide range of OSS issues  — including product team formation, systems integration challenges, selecting off-the-shelf software, and e-business initiatives — that are at the heart of the billing problems and priorities of large carriers. 

But this Briefing is about more than programs, integration issues, bundled bills, and off-the-shelf solutions. It’s also, very fundamentally, about people — the importance of hiring people with the right skill sets, the need to build effective teams, and the indispensability of “open and often” communications between those within your organization who are contributing to solving shared problems.

You’ll also find an ample supply of intelligence directed straight at the vendors who might be interested in knowing how best to contact and sell effectively to a large carrier organization

Table of Contents

• Barbara Bonner Biography 

• WorldNet - Building a Project Team

• Hiring People With Multiple Skills

• Building Partnerships Programs at AT&T

• Tackling Systems Integration Problems

• Flexible Architecture/Strategic Thinking

• Integration Phasing Problems

• Inter-Departmental Compromise vs. the "Thou Shalt Approach"

• Efforts to Consolidate Data Centers

• Legacy Work Arounds & End-User Moccasins    

• Selecting, Implementing, and Upgrading Off-the-Shelf Software

• Probing For Answers

• Looking Under the Hood

• Software Releases: Keeping Current

• Hiding the Software Capabilities Manual

• Trade Events - Don't Believe the Success Stories

• The Value of User Group Meetings

• E-Business Opportunities for Large Carriers
  Hardware Platform Savings

• E-Everywhere Skunk Works

• Stumbling - Then Getting it Right

• The Telecom-to-Enterprise Portal

• Sales Configurators    

• E-Servicing the Customer

• Managing Complex Sales Promotions

• Large Carrier Billing System Priorities

• Marketing Ploy/Systems Nightmare?

• Bundling at a Startup Carrier

• Corporate Hierarchy and Wholesale Relationship Tracking

• Who's Gonna Do the Accounting

• Hierarchies and Bundling: Key Leverage Points for CLECs

• Billing Mediation - Keeping Track in an Interconnect World

• Plugging Leaky Revenue Holes with Mediation

• Selling to a Large Telecom Organization

• The Multi-Pronged Sales Approach

• Tailoring the Sales Message

• The Vendor as Consultant

• Staying Abreast of Technology

• Sharing Information - It's a Long-term Partnership