Focus: The Difference Between Aspiration and Achievement

Adan Pope, CTO & CSO, Telcordia

Remember the days when success in telecom was measured by “5-9s,” achieving 99.999% availability as we tackled network deployments?  You hit your metric, you succeeded.  You missed, and you faced a regulatory commission.  Today, the conversations are much different, and usually center on dramatically transforming the business to address seismic shifts in consumer demands across a fragmenting marketplace.  Typical organizational metrics too often run headlong into the laws of unintended consequences.  But without a clear vision of where you are heading, and an almost militaristic focus on the key business processes that will instantiate that vision across the enterprise, all you have are good intentions without the results.

Measure Twice, Cut Once

From my point of view, realizing one’s potential in telecom stems from the proper application of the art and science of good business management.  The science of good business management has to do with having an aspiration to serve a particular market, to operate in a given manner, and to deliver a set of products and services.  You create a set of objectives, lay out a plan to get there, and to measure and adjust as you go.  As Chief Technology Officer and Chief Strategy Officer for Telcordia, I have a privileged view of what is on the minds of senior executives around the industry, their aspirations, and their philosophies on how to achieve their goals.  As for the art of business management, well, that may be more about experience, success and failures, and lessons learned combined with the people you surround yourself with as you aim to turn aspirations into achievements.

What is most telling to me is that the conversations I am having with service providers are very much different in tone and nature than just a few years ago.  We are now taking about a reality that service providers face where their potential in the market is based on their ability to change dramatically and quickly in the face of this seismic shifts in consumer and enterprise demand and value.  Customers want a personalized service and they want to customize the service and its value to suit their unique and individual needs and desires.  And this is where the hand-wringing starts: consumers today are very willing to accept less than 5-9s but they expect telecom services to be free.  The executives I meet are now talking more about “What are we good at” or “What can we offer” or “How can we compete” or “How can we get faster,” and, for some, “Who are we and what do we now want to be.”  These are all worthy and important questions, asked by extremely capable and experienced people and companies looking to fashion new-and-improved businesses from their unique  strengths and relative market position. 

The Three Things

As for achieving superior business performance, let me say first that if you think you are unique and cannot be benchmarked against your peers—please consider the fact that the markets compare the operational and business efficiency uniformly across the full spectrum of publically traded companies.  There’s only so much you can learn about cooking by standing in your kitchen staring at your stovetop.  Having said that, here’s what I have seen that seems to work, and some things that you might want to reconsider based on the trials and tribulations of those that have gone before you.

What works:

1.  A clear vision of what you aspire to be:  the customers you want to serve; the offers you intend to deliver; and how you want to differentiate yourself; and above all, the value to aim to create.

2.  A picture of the key business processes that you will need to manifest your vision, and how they operate across the enterprise—end-to-end—regardless of organizational boundaries.

3.  A strong FOCUS on those processes and the targets that need to be achieved to meet that vision.

In most organizations, those key business processes that are most impacted by B/OSS are:  Idea-to-Implementation; Plan-to-Provision; Order-to-Cash; and Trouble-to-Resolution. 

The challenge is to set your end-to-end goals clearly and then to identify all of the organizations—all of them—that have a shared fate in driving your objective.  One of our customers in the MENA region undertook a focus on automating their order-to-cash process.  While this service provider could have concentrated on the daunting task of migrating hundreds of legacy inventory systems to a centralized, corporate repository, their focus was instead on achieving their vision for transforming their enterprise into a regional leader in technology and business with streamlined operations supporting a full array of compelling next-gen service offers.  Systems migration was “merely” a means to the end.  What the market saw was reduced service order processing time via automation, increasing daily total of orders processed by 150%.  The total number of services that could be offered jumped 36%.  And launch times fell from months to weeks.