Thought your recent phone bill was high? Well, Telstra have been forced to stump up a whopping $30m to fix its faulty billing systems, which saw a multitiude of errors.
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This major bill was in part to clean up the mess created by Telstra’s “error riddled” Siebel billing system according to The Australian, which cost millions to install under previous boss, Sol Trujillo.
The Siebel billing system, which helps the telco process millions of customer bills is still subject to problems despite its best efforts and has now been forced to use Oracle’s Identity Management system, at a cost of $30m, to remedy the situtation.
So, rather than the multiple layers of architecture used by Siebel, the Oracle system is more seamless using a single layer of access and will improve the billing process for all Telstra customers.
It allow users with multiple bills be recognised as a single user, thus will give users access to all their separate accounts online, simultaneously.
“The investment in this technology will allow us to be much faster in service and capability. And it will also get us closer to the holy grail of separating individual and user roles,” said Gerd Schenkel, Telstra’s digital boss.
“So if you order a mobile phone through a corporate contract you will have different access privileges in that application than you do with your own consumer product. In the new system we will have much better access and visibility to that and we will be able to attach identity and access credentials to a single person.”
This comes as Telstra announced its first Facebook app yesterday, meaning customers can log onto the social network 24/7 and get rep response within the hour. The Facebook app is to go on full release this June.
Vodafone also uses the Siebel system although it too ran into trouble last year after claims its billing and call records for up to four million customers were openly available online.
