The great thing about the holiday period is you often get the chance to step away from business as usual (BAU) activities. As customer projects go into a brief hiatus, it clears a little space in the calendar to read and plan for what to do in the year ahead.
This book “It’s Not the Big That Eat the Small…It’s the Fast That Eat the Slow: How to Use Speed as a Competitive Tool in Business,” by Jason Jennings and Laurence Haughton, helped act as reminder of planning for structural changes underway in the telco industry (and most industries for that matter).
Speed has the potential to trump size in the modern business world, especially in telco.
Today’s article will discuss:
- The urgency of informed, decisive action and how it can deliver a significant advantage in the highly competitive telco industry
- How OSS/BSS enhance a telco’s ability to rapidly experiment and iterate to ensure evolution
- The historic cultural norms that can prevent telcos from achieving necessary speed
Telco, especially retail telco services, is mostly a volume and efficiency game. In the past it needed huge workforces to deliver a network and services to customers. Telcos thrived on economies of scale and having large pools of resources to build and operate vast networks. Today that might actually count against them. But more on that shortly.
Whenever I work “inside” large telcos*, I feel like I make one day progress for every five days worked (20% efficiency). When working from the outside into large telcos, I feel that it’s more like five for five (100% efficiency or 5x the output compared with being inside the telco). Communications at scale, and bureaucracy more generally, slow down the speed of the large telco factory. I’ve observed this phenomenon within every large telco I’ve worked with, spread across multiple continents.
* I refer to the large telcos as mammoths – as in both huge in size, but also on the brink of extinction unless they can find a way to adapt to the changing environments around them.
Economies of scale have traditionally been powerful enough to overcome the stagnation of bureaucracy (bureaucracies of scale). Think of it like a helium balloon counteracting and overcoming the forces of gravity. At what point to bureaucracies of scale outweigh the economies of scale?
Today, the automation of data and technology (particularly LLMs), is allowing ever-smaller organisations to achieve significant volumes of output and resource efficiency without the gravitational counter-force of organisation size. Organisations can do more with less as a result of modern technologies.
This has swung the pendulum towards speed, as outlined in Jennings and Haughton’s book.
The four key principles of speed, as outlined in It’s Not the Big That Eat the Small… It’s the Fast That Eat the Slow, are:
- Spotting Opportunities Early
- The ability to identify emerging trends, market shifts, and customer needs before competitors
- Businesses achieve this through vigilance, continuous market analysis, and fostering a culture where employees are encouraged to share insights
- Decision-Making Agility
- Quickly assessing options and making decisions without being bogged down by analysis paralysis or excessive bureaucracy
- This requires clarity of goals, streamlined processes, and empowerment of individuals to act decisively
- Executing Quickly
- Turning decisions into actions with minimal delays
- Speedy execution relies on efficient workflows, eliminating bottlenecks, and fostering cross-functional collaboration
- Sustaining Fast Growth
- Building systems and processes that allow for continuous adaptation and improvement while maintaining momentum
- This includes learning from failures, iterating rapidly, and avoiding complacency as the company grows
These principles can work together to help telco businesses thrive in their fast-paced, competitive environments by prioritising agility, adaptability, and proactive engagement over traditional advantages like size or resources.
I’d argue that OSS/BSS are one of the most significant contributors to (or constraints against) the speed of a telco.
How? Well, let’s start by looking at the four principles of speed through a lens of how OSS/BSS systems can enable telcos to improve agility, efficiency, and responsiveness:
1. Spotting Opportunities Early
OSS/BSS systems provide the foundation for telcos to detect emerging trends, anticipate customer needs, and identify network demands before competitors. Key enablers include (but are certainly not limited to) the following:
- Real-Time Analytics and AI/ML Integration – OSS/BSS platforms equipped with advanced analytics can monitor network usage patterns, predict capacity demands, and identify opportunities for new services. AI/ML enhances this by analysing trends and generating actionable insights.
- Customer Behaviour Insights – BSS modules offer deep customer insights through data such as usage patterns, preferences, and churn likelihood. These insights help telcos tailor services, target high-value segments, and respond proactively to changing demands.
- Network Planning and Optimisation – OSS solutions provide tools to model future network requirements, enabling faster rollout decisions for 5G, fibre, or edge computing initiatives.
2. Decision-Making Agility
Telcos often face challenges with slow decision-making due to complex legacy systems, siloed operations, multiple organisational tiers and delayed access to information. OSS/BSS solutions help streamline this by:
- Predicting What’s Coming via Real-time Collection of Data – OSS/BSS platforms are continually collecting data, not just about the network, but every aspect of the organisation on 24 x 7 x 365 basis, as represented by the Telco Business Model Map diagram below. If used to its full extent, this data can provide decision-makers throughout the organisation with truly “finger on the pulse” insight:
- Unified View of Operations – Well-integrated OSS/BSS platforms connect silos, providing a single coherent view network performance, customer data and the other types of operational metrics mentioned above. This enriches insights and accelerates decision-making across any team with OSS/BSS access (potentially including technical, operations and business teams)
- Dynamic Service Configuration – With advanced orchestration capabilities, telcos can dynamically configure and deliver services to meet evolving customer requirements without lengthy provisioning cycles. This hypothetically allows faster experimentation to see what offers resonate most with their customer-base
- Automated Decision Support – Advanced decision support tools can recommend the best course of action based on real-time data, such as re-routing traffic during network congestion or offering personalised promotions to prevent churn or even best allocation of capital / resources
3. Executing Quickly
As arbitrage opportunities are getting shorter, speedy execution is critical for telcos – to roll out new services, fix issues, and deliver exceptional customer experiences – whether that be reactively (eg responding to a competitor’s successful product launch before they gain significant advantage) or proactively (eg having first mover advantage by offering an attractive new bundle before competitors). OSS/BSS systems enable telcos to stay ahead by thinking fast through:
- Rapid Prototyping and Time to Market (TTM) Minimisation – Automating service provisioning via OSS reduces the time taken to deploy services, ensuring faster time-to-market. For example, new services can be activated in minutes rather than days. Similarly, new offers can be generated within days rather than months. Innovating faster than the competition can deliver significant benefits
- End-to-End Process Automation – Automated workflows and workflow optimisation in OSS/BSS systems streamline processes such as order fulfilment, service activation, fault-fix and billing. This can have a multitude of benefits ranging from faster turn-on of revenue, greater efficiency through reduced re-work resulting from manual errors and even brand value through the word-of-mouth benefits of accelerating customer service delivery times. Moreover, Workforce Management (WFM) tools within OSS ensure that field technicians are dispatched efficiently, with the right resources, to resolve issues faster
- Addressing Customer Concerns – An ability for an OSS/BSS to rapidly gauge customer sentiment, network / service health and identify any service degradations, telcos can quickly address customer concerns, creating competitive advantages and enhancing brand value
4. Sustaining Fast Growth
Telcos must continuously adapt their operations and services to maintain momentum and evolve to market needs. OSS/BSS systems support speed of execution by:
- Scalable Architectures – Well implemented OSS/BSS platforms allow telcos to right-size infrastructure and operations to make optimal use of available resources across diverse geographies, infrastructures or customer segments without major system overhauls
- Customer Focus via Continuous Service & Support Experimentation and Innovation – In the past, taking new offers to market took months of planning and IT customisation. More modern flexible service creation environments enable telcos to rapidly experiment to determine real market demand. This reduces costs, TTM and the risk of building a new offer that doesn’t achieve market up-take. These rapid feedback loops can show actual market interest rather than hypothetical interest (some offers fall flat even after initial market research looked promising)
- Performance Monitoring and Improvement – OSS/BSS tools gather data to provide KPIs and dashboards that allow telcos to measure network and service performance continuously. Insights are fed back into operations for iterative improvements. With the vast array of metrics collected, telcos can identify patterns (and arbitrage opportunities) more readily than ever before
- Mass-reduction – Reducing layers of management to streamline communication and transfer of insight
However, many of the cultural norms of traditional telcos actually constrain the ability to operate at speed. What were benefits in the past can actually be limitations today, including:
- Risk Aversion, “Gold-plated” Networks and Over-Reliance on Established Processes – Large Telcos rightly tend to prioritise network resilience and service stability, avoiding risks due to the critical nature of their infrastructure and services. However, this can stifle speed, innovation and experimentation. It can also foster a resistance to change
- Siloed Organisational Structures – To reach their historical scale, telcos needed to divide and conquer. Rigid organisational silos where departments such as engineering, IT, marketing, and customer service operate largely independently. Siloed systems often aligned with the organisational siloes, hindering coherent operations and insights
- Bureaucracy and Hierarchical Decision-Making – Also relating to organisational scale, traditional telcos operate with layers of management, requiring approvals at multiple levels before implementing changes or launching initiatives. Bureaucracy creates inertia, where even minor decisions can take weeks or months, significantly reducing responsiveness
- Focus on Network-Centric Thinking Over Customer-Centricity – Traditional telcos often prioritise the technical aspects of their networks / systems and the building of internal empires rather than focusing on delivering exceptional customer experiences. This inward focus can slow down the speed of innovation, as teams spend disproportionate time seeking consensus and/or technical perfection
- Legacy Offerings, Technology and Processes – The fear of losing customers / revenues and complex technical dependencies can stifle creative destruction
- Metrics that Matter – Telcos traditionally measure success by operational efficiency (e.g., cost reduction, network uptime) rather than agility (e.g., time-to-market, customer responsiveness)
- Vendor Dependence – Telcos have increasingly relied heavily on external vendors for network and system upgrades or new capabilities, rather than fostering internal expertise and innovation in recent decades. This can make innovation reliant upon a vendor’s roadmap and resources, instead of developing in-house capabilities
- Time & Materials-based Outsourcing Contracts – When a telco creates contracts with suppliers / vendors that are based on the time and materials / resources spent (rather than the value or outcomes delivered), it can incentivise complex / over-engineered solutions. In turn, these extend project timelines and disincentivise simpler or more efficient approaches that might reduce billable hours. It also subtly encourages scope creep, prolonged decision-making and/or ambiguous requirements to increase billable work
To conclude, I believe the success of the telco industry is dependent on all of us delivering with greater speed across all of the speed dimensions mentioned above. It also means having a focus on friction reduction across all the 13 dimensions mentioned here.
What are your thoughts? How can we contribute to making the telco industry more dynamic?
