Earlier this month I had the honour of giving the opening keynote at the Orange Summer School on IS Innovation at their Labs in Paris. I talked about how the IT systems that support telecoms provider’s businesses are going to have to adapt to the changes in technology and business models that are already starting to happen and will really be accelerated by the advent of 5G.
As I have written before, I see the challenge coming from two directions, a constant arrival of new network technology that must be integrated with minimum disruption, as well as a need for an agile business building complex new partnerships.
My take on the priority for IT systems is that the key requirements centre around how components of the system behave, rather than exactly how we layer them. I talked about catalog and model driven systems and dynamic integration along a theme of “no assumptions”. We used to be able to see changes coming and plan the changes to our systems, that is no longer the case and we need to build systems that can change dynamically based on the inputs of service designers and product managers, possibly even customer and partners, rather than IT admins.
This flexible component behaviour is a key aspect of the TM Forum Open Digital Architecture project, which I had the honour to kick off and lead for its first year. I’ve only been away from it for a few months, but the team is making very rapid progress and it took me some time to work through all that has been achieved recently so I could update the audience on it.
When you present to an audience of the calibre of this group form Orange Labs you have to expect some tough questions, and I have to say these were some of the most searching (and therefore interesting) I recall. The one that set me thinking the most was about customers. To paraphrase the question, it was something like “we learn that when we are launching new technology we have to understand the needs of our customers, what are the customers’ needs for 5G?”. It is a very insightful question, and I think the answer is that the customers’ need is for us to not have to understand their needs in advance.
Historically we have tried to work out what our customer will want, and more importantly what they will be prepared to pay for. If we are honest as an industry we have not had a terribly good track record of getting this right. We under estimated the popularity of SMS, and over estimated the value of video calling to give two blatant examples. Don’t get me started on MMS or WAP. What our customers want, is that when they hear that an innovator has come up with a new service they can try it out straight away and if they like it use it. They don’t want to know what technology is underneath, they don’t want to have to change settings on their phone or call someone at their service provider to get something enabled.
Our marketing teams want the same, in another discussion we were talking about the limitations placed on family price plans by assumptions buried deep in our charging and billing systems that seem almost impossible to change. Those assumptions were once perfectly reasonable.
If we accept that we do not know what services and business models will work going forward we must accept that any assumptions we make about products, services and business models will be wrong and design with no assumptions. Don’t make assumptions about the relationships between parties in the billing relationship, don’t even assume you know all possible future scenarios, let the service designer declare it in the model.
When I read back my statement above it seems a statement of the obvious, but that is not the way we have historically worked, we design in assumptions without even realising we are doing it. It is vital to keep focused on you customers’ needs, but maybe their biggest need is for you to accept that you don’t understand their future needs? As I said, that got me thinking…