Policy is a Technology. Rich Personalization is a Service. But that’s not how we’re building our future.

By Grant F. Lenahan
Policy is one of the most important emerging technologies in communications and information networks. But it is misunderstood and pigeon-holed to the detriment of Communication Service Providers (CSPs), consumers and architects.

design a house that is warm, at minimum cost, you might not like the result. It would likely have thick walls, no windows and lots of other compromises. If, on the other hand, you asked for a house that was warm, airy, good for entertaining and accommodated a growing family (and lots of other personal preferences), you’d hopefully get a very different house. The problem is, if you start with that poured-concrete block, it’s hard to incrementally make it over into a family/entertaining stunner. Our industry seems to be heading down the cement block path as carriers look to optimize policy infrastructure for network actions such as access control and Quality of Service (QoS). We should think more broadly.

Policies are logical rules. And policy definition is an elegant way for CSPs to define rules to accommodate the unending list of personal preferences that are in demand today and will be the revenue makers of tomorrow. Whenever we have a fairly common occurrence — like a data or voice session being set up, it might be natural to ask questions about it — technology questions (What quality does this require? How much capacity?); Business questions (Who pays for this session? Are there limitations on usage?); and more personal questions (Are there time-of-day restrictions? Is adult content blocked? Does the user prefer format A or B?). If we design this right, we never change the logic of the underlying session and its control — but day-to-day we add and change policies. This leads to a more flexible, maintainable service environment and a better overall customer experience that creates the revenue drivers and stickiness for which CSPs yearn.

Policy is a tremendously broad area, with implication across almost all current and future services. Today’s services employ policy, although its not always recognized. A prepaid call follows the policy that “only users with money in their balances can make calls” but is delivered to customers as an interactive experience with real time balance to give the customers more control. Postpaid customers, with on average higher spend, lack this interactive experience and service providers are missing the opportunity to build an interactive relationship with these customers. Policy will give their users more control over their service, help reduce churn as user’s personalize their service on the CSP’s network. Tomorrow’s services, need to truly benefit from the richness of policy and give the customer more control of all their services and how they are charged. Policies can make the future highly personalized, and, therefore, much more attractive. They can ensure you receive news to your liking and have content delivered in formats you prefer. They can help deliver ads and promotions that are relevant to you. They can even help protect you from fraud and misuse in e-commerce. All of this will help CSP defend and grow their market. This leads us the industry’s need to look at Policy slightly differently, along the lines of these concepts:

1. Policies should apply across protocols and media types, so that consumer preferences are implemented independently of technology silos to build an interactive relationship on the CSPs web portal, on web-enabled devices and simply by supporting policy personalization via the service provider call center as a value added service.

2. Policies should not be duplicated for content and value added services or for voice, messaging and data services — the cornerstones of today’s revenues. This makes both administration (by CSPs) and the user experience more troublesome.

3. While policies themselves should not be duplicated, we must recognize that a network will likely wind up with policy decision platforms (aka: PDFs or PCRFs) from different vendors (maybe a network vendor, a charging vendor and a personalization vendor) that must work in coordinated harmony. This implies a SCIM-like function such as “PIM” or Policy Interaction Manager.

4. Policy standards must define messages that handle user policies; i.e., non-network policies, such as parental controls, content management, etc. They need to be highly extensible, since people’s demand for personalization is almost limitless.

5. Policy needs to be at the core of building a new interactive relationship without it, CSPs will lose ground with consumers, globally.

If we all worked toward these five simple goals, CSPs would be in a very attractive position, with the ability to provide their customers with a highly individual experience across all types of services and media. The rules that would govern mobile phones could be the SAME as those that govern watching HDTV or web browsing. The user experience would be both consistent and simple.

And, amazingly enough, this would be a far simpler software environment to maintain and expand over time.

So as an industry let’s start viewing Policy as the enabler of great user experiences that drive revenue and customer loyalty. That should be the impetus to give input to our collective architects accordingly!

Grant F. Lenahan is Vice President and Strategist, IMS Service Delivery Solutions at Telcordia Technologies, Inc. (www.telcordia.com).

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