| | May 201719CIOReviewCustomer Centricity by Design: Engineering the Next-Generation Back Office By Scott Alcott, CIO, Comcast CableThe best back office technology is invisible to customers,- but getting your back office system to deliver that kind of seamless functionality requires a CIO to take a closer look at core architectural decisions. Creating an elegant customer experience starts with placing the customer at the center of your design and development processes. Back office systems are sticky. Built and evolved over years, if not decades, and home to essential functions and data, enterprises often find it easier to iterate and bolt onto existing systems than to tear things down and start afresh. This process of iteration can accomplish quite a lot. We have dramatically streamlined and redesigned the user experience for our care professionals, providing clearer, more actionable data in a simpler more intuitive format. We've seen and measured how our efforts have led to better, faster resolution of issues and a better customer experience. We've also invested in an enterprise-wide resiliency program that has already reduced IT incidents by 55 percent and led to an 80 percent reduction in time-to-repair. As we continue to expand that program to more systems, we see measurable improvements in performance and reliability. Those are important steps, and ones that work within the context of a traditional back office environment, but to achieve the full performance and functionality, we need to serve our customers. We knew we had to go a step further. Today, we are engaged in an enterprise-wide effort to re-architect our back office from the ground up, and that process began with a laser focus on the back office's most important stakeholder: the customer. Evolving from Address-based Systems in a Mobile World Our world has changed. Twenty years ago, it made sense to think of the home as the center of our customers' lives, and the focal point for our service delivery and IT systems. In the world of telecommunications, Operations Support Systems (OSS) and Business Support Systems (BSS) have traditionally been centered on homes, rather than individuals. Built during a time when a household would have a single cable or phone service that customers used exclusively in the home, the address-based structure was logical and effective. But as technology has evolved, we've begun to see the limitations of that design approach. Today--in any given home in our network--different household members are likely to be enjoying a range of distinct experiences. In a single household, four or five people can easily interact with our services over four or five different screens, and they can have those experiences virtually anywhere if there's an Internet connection. Each of those customers may be making transactions that require back office touches--whether that's a video-on-demand purchase, or a TV Everywhere stream--and many of those transactions may be taking place outside the home.Customers are using our products everywhere, taking them on the go, moving to new addresses, extending them to kids heading off to college and second properties, creating a world in which the center of our constellation of products and services is no longer an address, but a highly mobile customer. The best system in the world won't perform properly without the right data to support itCIO INSIGHTS
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