OSS that capture value, not just create it

I’ve just had a really interesting first day at TM Forum’s Digital Transformation Asia (https://dta.tmforum.org and #tmfdigitalasia ). The quality of presentations was quite high. Some great thought-provoking ideas!!

Nik Willetts kicked off his keynote with the following quote, which I’m paraphrasing, “Telcos need to start capturing value, not just creating it as they have for the last decade.”

For me, this is THE key takeaway for this event, above any of the other interesting technical discussions from day 1 (and undoubtedly on the agenda for the next 2 days too).

The telecommunications industry has made a massive contribution to the digital lifestyle that we now enjoy. It has been instrumental in adding enormous value to our lives and our economy. But all the while, telecommunications providers globally have been experiencing diminishing profitability and share-of-wallet (as described in this earlier post). Clearly the industry has created enormous value, but hasn’t captured as much as it would’ve liked.

The question to ask is how will our thinking and our OSS/BSS stacks help to contribute to capturing more value for our customers. As described in the share of wallet post above, the premium end of the value chain has always been in the content (think in terms of phone conversations in days gone by, or the myriad of comms techniques today such as email, live chat, blogs, etc, etc). That’s what the customer pays for – the experience – not the networks or systems that facilitate it.

Nik’s comments made me think of Andrew Carnegie. Monopolies such as the telecommunications organisations of the past and Andrew Carnegie’s steel business owned vast swathes of the value chain (Carnegie Steel Company owned the mines which extracted the raw materials needed to make steel, controlled the transportation used to deliver the materials and the product, and ran the mills used for steel production). Buyers didn’t care for the mines or mills or transportation. Customers were paying for the end product as it is what helped them achieve their goals, whether that was the railway tracks needed by the railroads or the beams needed by construction companies.

The Internet has allowed enormous proliferation of the premium-end of the telecommunications value chain. It’s too late to stuff that genie back into the bottle. But to Nik’s further comment, we can help customers achieve their goals by becoming their “do-it-yourself” digital partners.

Our customers now look to platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Google, WordPress, Amazon, etc to build their marketing, order capture, product / content delivery, commercial transactions, etc. I really enjoyed Monty Hong‘s presentation that showed how Telkomsel’s OSS/BSS is helping to embed Telkomsel into customers’ digital lifestyles / value-chains. It’s a perfect example of the biggest OSS loser proof discussed in yesterday’s post.

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