The Rate of Business Change

TRI: For years, the RA software market has struggled to grow. And I'm convinced that one reason for that slow growth is that RA is a control, not an operational function. As billing and order management processes get better at catching problems upstream, are you afraid that you'll run out of work?

Romano: You're right that IT and billing each have their own sets of controls. At Verizon, RA is considered a secondary control. However, RA isn't going to run out of work anytime soon.

The rate of change in our business is so intense that it's hard to be perfect but that's the goal. Every time you put in new code, you perform extensive testing and errors appear that you didn't anticipate.

This is because you can't always predict how a customer or rep is going to interface to the system. There will always be scenarios where a customer is unhappy because human beings didn't forecast a problem when they were testing it.

As IT sits down to code, a lot of times the product manager will write down requirements that do not cover the complete scope of the many systems. That's why with an extra set of business eyes looking at the plan, you catch things and cover situations not originally conceived in product design.