If you can't measure it, you can't manage it. This business school mantra has been repeated numerous times by grizzled management veterans in the hundreds of management schools across the developed world over the past 30 years.
The logic is simple. If you don't know how well you are doing at present, then how can you know if you are getting better or worse? Shocking as it may sound, the telecom industry has managed to
turn a blind eye to this 'home truth' for much of its long and distinguished history. Without serious competition to trouble it, the incumbent operators had no need to know how well they were delivering
their service - or even how profitable they were on a service by service basis.
But of course all that has changed. Now competition and churn are rife, and holding on to customers depends on how well your customer rates your service versus your competitors. And of course, whether you continue to offer a particular service at all is dependant on individual service profitability. So effective, efficient measurement of all aspects of your performance has become a critical success factor. And benchmarking that performance against the performance of others is the only objective way to know if you are doing well enough to survive and thrive in the long term.
With this in mind, I spent the first part of this week at TM Forum's Business Process Benchmarking Summit in London and was pleasantly surprised to see the growth in importance of benchmarking within the major European Operators. All the operators there had dedicated teams looking at the whole area of benchmarking - and not just as a defensive measure, but as a mechanism for driving transformation of their businesses - from 'Old World Telco' to 'New World ICE Service Provider’.
TM Forum Business Benchmarking activities are acting as a focal point for much of this emerging industry interest in benchmarking, and already we have many operators participating in our benchmarking programs, ranging from billing to DSL to mobile.
Surprisingly, many of the operators I spoke to this week are no longer content to compare themselves only with their peers, but are increasingly looking to other industries to compare themselves against. They know that their customers are as likely to compare the quality of service delivery between one telco and another as they are to compare telco service delivery quality with the quality of service they get from their local grocery store. So telcos are beginning to compare themselves with the financial industry, the airline industry and the retail & transport industries. And high time, too! I suspect that what they will discover is that the comparison is none too flattering, and that can only lead in the long term to improved service quality for the telecom end user.