| You are describing a Master Data Management(MDM) system. Also referred to as "single source of truth" in a data oriented system. The data in a MDM is homogeneous. The most important requisite for MDM's effectiveness that every downstream system needs to get data from MDM. No system should generate it's own data. While those are general rule in practice, it is a difficult task to pull off. The problem is not technical but rather due to people. There are tons of department in a company. And every time an input is made things change a little. It's due to human mistakes, software restrictions and lot more. I haven't worked in teleco but here's an example on what goes wrong when data is recorded. Marketing will send out flyers to say 100 people. One of them is named ABC XYZ. This person is interested in a phone line from say AT&T. When sales of AT&T take this up due to some problem, the name is recorded as ABC-XYZ ie with a hyphen. Now this data is human readable but doesn't make sense to a computer. So, when it comes to tallying up marketing and sales it doesn't work. Now things get worse when a connection has been sold, the address field in sales might be smaller compared to a full fledged customer system. So, sales says address is "XYZ Street" whereas customer system says "SSS Boulervad, XYZ Street". And then this snowballs further. To resolve this many companies try to implement a UCM - Unified Customer Management systems, a branch of MDM. But then there are people's ego, money considerations etc come in the way. So companies don't bother with it and go with settlement vendors. Now, this is a similar situation when it comes to CDR. Different equipment means different sets of data, that's why they need a settlement company. So, the problem is not a simple - middlemen eating money. There are lot of things going on. |