Telecom billing in ServiceNow

[dan_cooper]

I'm interested to know if anyone is doing telecom billing in ServiceNow - particularly having replaced Pinnacle or MySoft.

[chris_jones2]

Interested to know if you ever heard anything from anyone on this question, Daniel

[dan_cooper]

I've not heard from anyone so far.

[johnr_1]

I signed up for an account today to ask this very same question.   So far on the Pinnacle Community, about 15 folks have responded with either "integrate or in the process of integration" between Pinnacle and ServiceNow.   Telecom Management is quite unique and we need to determine if anyone who has an existing Telecom Expense Management tool can completely migrate to ServiceNow.   This would include Moves, Adds, Changes, and Disconnects of enterprise telephone lines, devices, and services.   We also need to understand how ServiceNow would process Call Detail Records and be able to rate and attach calls to a user.   There are also E911 records to consider.

So, Has anyone done this, and if so, what were the development and maintenance costs, and what are the pros and cons.

[chris_jones2]

This is kind of funny, John. Someone in our organization forwarded me a thread from a Pinnacle user group list (which I can't seem to find a way to join) on this subject, then I got notified of this response to the thread, only to then see that you were the user in both cases!

For what it is worth, since this thread, I've seen and heard a few other things. In particular, we've spoken with the U of Kentucky about their efforts, and they have a nice integration that is working for them. We will look at that further when we get past some other, higher priority development efforts. But I was most intrigued with the idea of replacement, rather than integration. Your list of necessary features is a good one: MAC's, device mngt, telecommunications, etc. are the most obvious because there are specific apps/modules in ServiceNow that are obviously applicable, and - while I don't yet have examples of anyone DOING it - it is not difficult to see how ServiceNow could easily support those business functions if you took the time to build them out correctly. For us, the sticking point has always been the call rating; that is, being able to map the calls made to the charges incurred and then billed to appropriate accounts.

Want to hear a radical idea that I am seriously considering making a play for? Stop rating calls. We'd have to look at the ramifications of this, but I would be surprised if the long-distance call usage (which, as I understand it, is the primary reason for call rating) is enough to cover the costs of doing this anymore. Yes, someone would have to "eat" the long distance usage costs at some point, but are they really enough to justify all this work? By the way, this is not idle ramblings...our University of Kentucky friends and others are already considering this. Your point about e911 is an interesting one; I'm not sure how our Pinnacle system is related to that, but we'd have to do a lot of fact-finding before going this direction. Still, I think it is a power change-in-pardigm type idea.