"We have 30 different billing systems, each developed a little differently and in a different period of time," says CIO Edward Glotzbach. "It was a big-enough problem when we just had one company, but now that we have multiple companies, we have multiple legacy systems that we have to assimilate into one architecture for the corporation."

Many Into One
SBC's IT department has launched a "Single Suite" initiative that during the next 14 to 24 months will terminate many of the legacy systems and migrate them to a single billing platform. This will let SBC integrate the billing of different services and also help it to resolve customer inquiries faster. Single Suite also is expected to lead to new forms of billing presentation via the Internet. "Instead of having several groups of systems service different companies, we will just have one group of systems that serves the whole enterprise," Glotzbach says.

At Sprint, the IT department must update legacy billing systems and build order-entry, billing, provisioning, service assurance, and data management systems for the company's Integrated Online Network, a public network that combines data and voice traffic on a single infrastructure. An added complication: The network runs on Sprint's asynchronous transfer mode backbone network and call traffic is measured in cells rather than minutes.

"Not too many consumers are going to understand they used 15 million cells in the past month," says Dennis Huber, VP of network operations and systems management at Sprint. "They're going to understand minute-based billing, like customers have for the past 100 years."

This forced Sprint's IT department to write billing software that converts ATM cells into minute-based calls so customers get service invoices based on minutes of use.

Moving to new technology systems also is viewed as crucial to improving customer service, which is becoming more important to telecom companies. "Telecommunications is moving from a product-focused marketplace to a cus- tomer-focused marketplace," says Kevin Costello, a partner in Arthur Andersen's global telecommunications and entertainment group.

The separate departments and systems that support wireline, wireless, Internet, and other services have to merge, according to Costello, so customers with problems or questions can talk to one service representative who can handle all their needs. That's one reason US West is replacing a legacy billing system that was put in place more than 12 years ago with a prepackaged, partially customized mainframe software system that supports Internet, wireless, and other types of services.

The system is designed to let US West customer-service reps set up local telephone, paging, Internet, broadband, and other services. The reps use a Windows NT workstation and a Web front end to navigate multiple systems that provide billing, ordering, and provisioning information for voice, data, wireless, Internet, and other services. Previously, the service reps had to access different applications and understand how to navigate through them.

"When customers come to our door, we can give them a full-service response," Schill says.

Telecom companies are also eager to employ the self-service capabilities enabled by the Web. US West's IT department has developed an application that lets residential customers order broadband service over the Internet. The company's Web site has also let customers order new services such as call waiting and view up-to-date bills.

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