Martin Creaner's Blog

Group-Think and Advertising

Martin Creaner — Thu, 29 May 2008 10:33:00 GMT

I'm always fascinated by how group-think works. Ideas get bandied around for years without gaining much traction. Then when you least expect it, the level of interest crosses some invisible, critical-mass line, and suddenly everyone is a believer. It's an avalanche reaction, that takes even the experienced industry-watchers by surprise.

Advertising-funded services is one such group-think example. Nine months ago when I would mention it to anyone in the telecoms industry, it would illicit a tolerant, patronizing assurance that “in the future, anything is possible”. But we are only nine month on, and it has now become an unassailable truth. Everyone believes it is inevitable and we only have to work out the annoying details of the business model, the regulations, and the linkages between our industry and the industry that buys the advertising spots. Fascinating!!

Last week in Nice at Management World, the TM Forum did its bit, by announcing that Ogilvy (the worlds largest advertising agency) was joining the TM Forum, and that it's Chairman, Rory Sutherland would be joining the TM Forum Advisory Board. We also had the CTO of Paramount Pictures, Alan Bell, speaking at the event and participating in a range of executive meetings during the week. Judging by the enthusiasm I witnessed we truly are on the way to a world where advertising funded communications services will become a reality.

But lets not under-estimate the challenges of the regulations that will inevitably govern what will, and will not, be allowed. The technology to insert complex advertising into communications & entertainment services already exists, and many different business models have a fair chance of working. But regulation about the use of personal data for targeted advertising is a big open question. That’s the one that we all have to keep our eyes on, because that's going to be the whole ball-game!!

Its a small world!

Martin Creaner — Fri, 07 Mar 2008 15:24:00 GMT

I was at our Management World Middle East event last week, held in Dubai on 3^rd – 5^th March . It proved to be an interesting and vibrant show in one of the most vibrant economies I have ever seen. Everywhere you look in the region you see construction. Literally hundreds of skyscrapers are under construction, including the new 'biggest building in the world', which no doubt will be superceded within 12 months of it being completed by some other mind-blowing structure!!

We had an attendance of around 150 people at our Middle East event and about 50% of these came from all the major Service Providers in the region. There was also a strong presence at the event from the regulatory authorities of the region, with attendees from both UAE and Kuwait regulators.

It is interesting, but not surprising to see that the challenges facing this region are similar if not identical to the challenges facing the other major regions of the world. The presentations at the event covered similar topics to our equivalent events in Europe, USA or Asia. And the audience was equally knowledgeable and concerned over the diverse challenges of mobile configuration management, launching IPTV services, operations & business process reengineering and mobile advertising. In this industry it really is a small world!

The "Static Value Chain" is dead......long live the "Dynamic Value Network"

Martin Creaner — Tue, 05 Feb 2008 12:09:00 GMT

We had an excellent Team Action Week in Cascais, Portugal last week. It's always a pleasure to be able to spend a week immersing oneself in the business and technical challenges of the industry, in the company of the best minds in the industry. Over 200 of our TM Forum members turned up to debate, discuss and network with each other in over 40 different business & technical meetings, that covered all of the hot industry topics that absorb us today. We had meetings discussing the traditional areas of competence of the TM Forum such as Information modelling and Business Process modelling. But we also had meetings on topics such as device management and managing content within the broader communications environment.

As ever, I never leave Team Action Week without an epiphany of some sort, and last week was no exception. Just when I think I understand our rapidly changing industry, I get thrown a curve ball. For example last week Microsoft were at TM Forum Team Action Week in strength, and when I casually asked what they were hoping to get out of the event they told me that they were hoping to learn how Microsoft as a Service Provider could make use of the TM Forum work. I suppose I shouldn't be surprised that the industry value chain has changed to such an extent that Microsoft can in one breath be a mammoth software company and in the next breath be a service provider.

This is simply a graphic illustration of the fact that the days of the static value chain are over and we are well and truely in the era of the dynamic value network. This is a world where the players in the value chain engage in a complicated two-step, continually assessing and reassessing who their suppliers and customers should be in any given service context. Serious companies have to adjust to the fact that they will occupy six different positions in the value chain before breakfast.

And of course in order to survive in such a dynamic world you need flexible, well understood management systems. Management systems that can be reconfigured rapidly (or even automatically against clearly defined policies), and which don't come loaded with presumptions about how the industry operates and where your company sits in the value network. The only thing I'm sure about at this stage about our industry, is that there are many more surprises waiting for us.

Spending even more money on-line

Martin Creaner — Mon, 07 Jan 2008 10:23:00 GMT

Over the long holiday break, and with four young children, I found myself becoming a heavy-weight consumer of telecoms and on-line services. First mobile phones for children, on-line purchases of music for MP3 players & on-line gaming subscriptions. If my spending trends are typical of the rest of the developed world, I reckon 50% of my Christmas spending was carried out on-line, with a non-trivial amount of my budget being spent with telecoms and content companies. Of course this is what this new industry is betting on. Not just the migration of purchasing from the high-street to purchasing on-line, but the diversion of other types of spend towards the coffers of the communications, internet and entertainment companies.

But I suspect that we are hitting a glass ceiling on the amount of spend that can be diverted to the communications companies with the current technology approaches. The promise of a tightly integrated communications, internet & entertainment industry is still some ways off, and requires the emergence of standard service delivery platforms that allow the dizzying array of potential content providers to get their content to the mass market via the existing communications delivery and charging infrastructure.

But of course once that happens I will probably just end up spending even more money over the holiday season - so perhaps I had better rethink my industry vision!

Telcos Wake Up to Benchmarking

Rebecca Huft — Thu, 29 Nov 2007 19:11:00 GMT

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.