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Applying Lessons Learned from Rapid Product Innovation Francis Haysom, Executive Director, Strategy Office, Telcordia Last year you probably had 10 good ideas to take to market; next year you may have 100 or 1000 to operationalize. Rapid innovation is a key ingredient in maintaining value to customers and business partners, but when each innovation requires a re-tooling of systems and processes, there is a risk of organizational “thrashing”. Communications about converged services offer the raw materials necessary to meet customer demands and growing expectations, but actually delivering converged services is a complex operation—characterized by manual work and one-off OSS, and product innovation that all too often ends up driving operational processes. So, as you face a future of greatly increased service variety, how can you allow a customer to order services in a generic way, facilitating rapid product change, across an exponentially expanding supply chain—without changing the order process every time? Others Have Been There Well, for starters, you are not alone in this dilemma. Other market sectors have faced this problem, and provide lessons learned that are applicable to telecom. Personal computer (PC) manufacturers have been automating product introduction for years, allowing customers to order products in a generic way through abstraction and re-use. When hyper-competition hit the personal computer industry, many companies responded with a lean manufacturing approach, primarily focused on automation and outsourcing certain links in the supply chain. For the most part, the industry was preparing for an all-out price war driven by the half-life of the cost of computing and storage. The lore in the PC industry was that the new head of a consumer division at a major computer manufacturer challenged his team to design and deliver a personal computer that could be offered to consumers for “under 9999.” Nine months later, the cross-functional engineering-manufacturing-marketing team presented the business unit president with a prototype of a new PC that could be made for $9,999 as requested. “No,” said the executive, “I meant 99 dollars and 99 cents ($99.99).”
They wanted to be in the business of assembling reusable widgets. Get the latest technology into the hands of the consumer as quickly as possible. And let them have at it. But before they could expose their processes to customers, lean manufacturers had to first componentize and standardize. Then, and only then, could they offer their customers a more complex experience and customer value on top of that strong structure and process. Mass Customization? No Problem So as a communications service provider looking to expose triple-play assets and processes to interactive consumers and innovative retailers, what changes to your business will enable you to more efficiently design and deliver much greater numbers of lower volume services, while avoiding the custom workflows, interfaces, and one-off OSS that inhibit growth and innovation today? What will be that $99.99 challenge for telecom, and when we figure it out, will you be ready? Maybe it will be mass customization: more interactive services that can be personalized, packaged and priced in real time. But telcos have not tackled the standardized factory approach yet, having grown up on mass market offers (you can have any color that you like, as long as it is black.) As an industry, we used to introduce a product with some acceptable levels of manual work upon rollout, and look to automate as we hit a level of scale. Not so with mass customization. Mass customization requires a new level of efficiency and effectiveness. Automation plays an important role here, but what exactly are you automating? Controlling Your Future Let us look at bit at the “From” and “To” as they say in consulting-speak. From customer workflows that support high volumes of identical orders…To a provisioning control approach which can support lower volume (a.k.a. “long tail”) services with a low investment point and rapid time to introduction. The path in between From and To will be to abstract the product introduction process entirely, and to make it an everyday activity across the enterprise. The “From” is characterized by siloed provisioning stacks, custom workflow processes (BSS and OSS for every product; process dictated by product), and custom interfaces (BSS to OSS with boundaries different for different products). OSS processes are constrained by BSS processes. OSS data and process are replicated in BSS in order to support customer interactions. The results: slow idea to implementation times; late to market; large system integration effort for each new product. Sound familiar? The “To” is all about re-use, utilizing a service-factory-like provisioning control to enable rapid “idea to implementation” time for the fulfillment of new products by providing:
Much of this provisioning control approach to rapid product introduction will be supported by telecom service catalogs designed to centralize product management and increase automation. Service catalog software lets you quickly create new products and services from reusable components, assemble offers and orchestrate the handling of orders through the service fulfillment process. But as we learned from the PC industry, a rapid service innovation is not just about software or data. It is a change in mindset…a new methodology. To achieve re-use, you have to think in terms of re-use. Software without the methodology change will remain just that—software. Customers and value-added partners who can reach into your service factory and design new products will be creating new, profitable revenue streams by the hundreds, or thousands--for themselves and for you. But they can only do that if you change the way you interact with them. For more information, please contact Francis Haysom, Executive Director, Strategy Office, Telcordia, at fhaysom@telcordia.com or visit our website.
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