Join us in building a lively on-line community in support of the telecom business assurance profession. “Business assurance” is a wrapper term that draws a circle around the widely dispersed practice of using business controls, workflows and data marts to check for retail or enterprise billing/ordering errors, fraud issues, security holes, inter-carrier or partner billing problems, and a host of operational problems and opportunities. Business assurance is a rallying cry for champions of operational excellence. While our primary mission will be to promote the careers and enhance the knowledge of business assurance pros, a vital secondary mission is to infuse a “business assurance culture” across communications organizations — from board room executives to call center agents. Business assurance pros work for many telecom departments and the brainpower is supplied by both telco employees and virtual employees such as consultants and outsourced experts. Their job titles stretch far beyond the boundary of revenue assurance and fraud departments. If the mission of business assurance is to audit operations, analyze problems, and improve processes, that could take you into all sorts of places -- the call center, margin analysis, cybersecurity, to mention just a few. So that’s where business assurance is at today. It’s a diverse group of experts unified by a broad knowledge of telecom processes and a skill for manipulating diverse data sets to protect the enterprise, grow the business, or get to the root of critical issues. What’s Behind the Black Swan Name? “Business Assurance Journal” would have been an obvious title for this new magazine. Trouble is: that title is about as exciting as standing in line at a government office. We took our name from the New York Times best-selling book, The Black Swan; written by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. The book is a fascinating account of how people constantly misread data, let statistics fool them, and settle for over-simplified explanations that gloss over key nuances. In 16th century England, sighting a “black swan” was considered an impossible event until Dutch explorers confirmed the existence of black swans in Western Australia around 1697. In the book, Taleb defines a black swan as a highly improbable event that has a massive impact. Japan’s deadly 2011 tsunami is a negative black swan. The meteoric rise of Apple’s iPhone and the telecom service that accompanied it are positive black swans. We think the Black Swan name is a good metaphor for business assurance — the practice of analyzing/leveraging operational data and knowledge to benefit the business. White swans can be thought of as the expected events and well-functioning systems that allow a business to glide smoothly across the lake. Black swans, meanwhile, are the data anomalies and hard-to-discover facts that can impact the business for both good or bad. On the negative side are the system glitches, errant CDRs, outdated processes, inside fraudsters, malicious botnets, and other unseen icebergs that can sink the business. But there are positive black swans to exploit as well: low cost/high profit services like SMS and IN, breakthrough decision-making techniques, unexpected pockets of opportunity, and calculated risk-taking.