Mobile operators have their roots firmly in the utility services space. Indeed, many business customers still think of them largely as providers of voice minutes, perhaps with a little bit of data access or mobile email thrown in as a peripheral part of the deal.
Yet while they sometimes struggle to get their efforts recognised, most mobile players today are capable of delivering far more than that. Their service offerings are typically now quite diverse and comprehensive.
When Josie and I were recently reviewing our plans for researching mobile operator propositions for the business sector, we therefore ended up looking at a number of different dimensions and solution areas, the main ones being:
• Convergence of fixed and mobile communications
• Mobile email and other forms of messaging
• Full blown unified communications
• Communications enabled business processes
• Remote access to corporate applications
• Operator hosted business solutions
• Communications management solutions
• Professional services in relation to the above
To one degree or another, we have seen initiatives from most of the larger mobile players in most of these areas over the past few years. Those part of a larger group have been collaborating more with their sister organisations in the fixed telecom business, consulting and managed service business, and so on, while others with more of a mobile pure-play background have grown into new areas either organically or by acquisition.
Across the board, we have also seen mobile operators partnering a lot more with players in the IT space in acknowledgement that activity in many of the areas mentioned crosses the traditional separation between the IT and communications domains.
This extension of capability and propositions is interesting when looking at the dynamics of the industry in general and the way in which the supply side of the equation is changing. From a customer perspective, it also raises the question of whether mobile operators have now evolved enough to be regarded as genuine strategic suppliers to the enterprises they serve.
Before continuing with this line of thinking, it’s probably worth defining what we mean by the term ‘strategic supplier’. It’s something I personally spent a lot of time looking at when writing the supplier management chapter of ‘The Technology Garden’ book.
While it is tempting to regard suppliers that you spend a lot of money with or rely upon heavily for operational purposes as strategic, we prefer to put the emphasis on organisational synergy. By this, we don’t mean some woolly ‘feel good’ factor, but the existence of a relationship based on genuine trust and mutual understanding at a level that matters in terms of overall business direction.
A good test of strategic status is whether you call a supplier and take their advice on key issues before making highly significant business or technology decisions – not necessarily in every case, but in the areas relevant to their sphere of experience and expertise.
With this definition in mind, it is not unusual for big IT incumbents such as SAP, IBM, Oracle, Microsoft, and so on, to be regarded as strategic. Large consulting and outsourcing firms also often acquire strategic status.
So what about mobile operators?
Well to date, I can’t recall an example of a senior manager proactively calling out a mobile operator when asked to name the top three or four strategic ITC suppliers to their business. This is clearly a function of the limited utility-centric relationship that has traditionally been place, but is it time to reconsider our view of the operator community?
When we consider that many of the organisations we speak with during our research highlight changing working patterns within the workforce and the impact of advanced communications on the way they operate as strategic front-of-mind issues, a convincing argument could be made to invite mobile operators more into the planning process. After all, on paper at least, they would seem to have a lot to contribute having gone through their own analysis of requirements, dependencies, practicalities, etc when constructing their portfolios of offerings.
In practical terms, however, we need realistic about what we can expect in terms of maturity. We have come across mobile operator initiatives, for example, that have started by pulling together a few talented guys from the existing business and asking the get up to speed from a standing start in a new area. The trouble is that teams such as this on a steep learning curve often don’t know what they don’t know, and this really isn’t a good starting point for developing even a tactical advisory relationship with the customer, let alone a strategic one.
In other cases, operators have been smart enough to hire good managers in from other domains, e.g. the IT sector, but even then, it can take time to assemble and optimise offerings, delivery processes, and so on. While the thinking might be quite mature, challenges might still exist at the execution level while experience is gained.
Of course many of the new offerings we see emerging have arisen from the acquisition of going-concerns, or the back-ending of products and services with resources from established sister companies or partners. Where this is the case, there is a better chance of robust thinking and delivery, but even this is not enough in my opinion.
To step up to the role of strategic supplier, mobile operators really need to demonstrate a clear understanding of the overall communications, collaboration and remote access landscape, how it is evolving, and how to help customers figure out which things to do in which order to move forward efficiently and effectively in the context of their businesses. This has to include both the customer internal view, e.g. how certain initiatives and systems are likely to impact others and vice versa, and the industry view, with a clear articulation of how the operator fits into the overall supplier landscape.
There are all kinds of other things we could point to, including coherency of offerings and operations across geographic boundaries and a proven track record of delivering on the basics, for example, but at the end of the day, it’s meeting minds on big picture philosophy, objectives and requirements that matters – and, of course, a willingness to do what is needed to establish and maintain a high level, trusted and open relationship.
So are they there yet? Well at an operator community level I would say no, mostly because their activities are not as mature and joined up as they need to be, though some are starting to get pretty close. Earning a seat at the top table is not going to be easy though, as there are plenty of other contenders and a range of incumbents who are already providing advice and guidance in the areas we have mentioned.
Having said this, perhaps there is an opportunity here for customers looking for fresh input and ideas to start developing stronger relationships with operators as they continue their journey from utility, through solution provider, to strategic partner. Different perspectives can, after all, sometimes be useful to shake up our thinking, and let’s not forget that those with something to prove are often willing to try a lot harder when it comes to relationship building.
Tuesday, June 30, 2009
Thursday, June 11, 2009
Event review: IBM Information on Demand, Berlin
Organisations are accumulating information rapidly – a lot of information – and as research shows, the majority have challenges managing and exploiting it.
It was against this background that I recently attended IBM’s 2009 ‘Information on Demand’ event (IOD2009) in Berlin, designed to bring together customers, partners and industry analysts like me to discuss information management related matters and how IBM technology and services are relevant to them.
The danger with such end-user oriented gatherings is that they are so often designed primarily to cater for the immediate needs of ‘the faithful’, i.e. existing customers that are already committed the vendor’s offerings, and just want to know about the latest releases and roadmaps, and perhaps have an opportunity to network and party with their peers.
Now I am not going to say that IOD2009 didn’t have an element of this. Indeed, I would have been worried if it didn’t as it’s important to keep customers in the loop and gather their feedback at a detailed product level. It is also extremely valuable when a vendor facilitates networking and knowledge exchange within its user and partner community. Beyond such essentials, however, it is nice when events push the out the boundaries, tackle some of the bigger questions and issues, and even promote some thought leadership and best practice. IOD2009 delivered on these things too.
One of the enabling factors here is the breadth and depth of the IBM information management portfolio. Unlike niche vendors who can only address one part of the problem, and therefore sometimes define the world in a very blinkered manner and skew conversations accordingly, IBM has the luxury of considering the bigger picture holistically, in the knowledge that it has solutions relevant to most parts of it. In addition, the presence of its professional services divisions helps it to maintain solid bridges between the PowerPoint-centric world of product management and the real world in which solutions must be made to work in practice.
The only thing that gets in the way, at least for a pragmatic Brit like me with simple working class roots, is the amount of management consulting speak that American IBM executives insist on using when articulating visions, problems and solutions. Having said this, you can get a pretty good feel for the central theme of IOD2009, the ‘Information Agenda’, from some of the sound bites and phrases used in various keynotes:
* Leverage information for smarter business outcomes
* Move from information based projects to an information based enterprise
* Effective analysis and decision making starts with trusted information
* Creating meaningful business insights is what matters
* Put new intelligence to work to achieve ongoing differentiation and market leadership
* From application led transformation to information led transformation
* Right information at the right time at the right point in the business process
* The workplace is everywhere so data needs to be available everywhere
* Become an intelligent company
These are from my notes, and while I may not have jotted all of them down exactly right, the flavour and sentiment of what the audience heard should be pretty clear.
The overriding message was to move forward from the fragmented way in which information has typically been managed and exploited in the past, and start joining the dots. There is an organisational value perspective to this, which centres on a view of information as an enterprise level asset with the potential to contribute a lot more benefit than is being realised today. The key here is to break down barriers and open up silos to generate more coherent higher level insights into performance and operations.
Related to this is the functional dimension, based on the argument that we can manage and exploit information more effectively if we coordinate policy and practice across storage, backup, archival, description, discovery, retrieval, search, analytics, access, delivery, and so on. The cost and risk benefits of such a coordinated approach are particularly relevant against the backdrop of the current economic and regulatory environment.
The Information Agenda represents a step forward for IBM in the way it articulates information related challenges and how its various products and services work together to help tackle them. IBM is not telling us anything we don’t already know in terms of defining the problem, and is certainly not the only vendor waking up to what’s required. But now it is getting its own act together in terms of joined up thinking and offerings, which is something it has sometimes struggled with in the past, it’s got to the stage where it really can help its customers to define or review their thoughts, priorities and plans in the bigger picture context.
The maturing of IBM’s approach around the Information Agenda concept therefore has to be welcomed. Suppliers that can see beyond point products and have a grown up conversation about pulling the relevant threads together in a practical way have much more to contribute.
With this in mind, I found the detailed breakout sessions dealing with best practice and cross domain views of the world particularly interesting at IOD2009. The traditional product oriented content was still there, but set against the backdrop of the holistic Information Agenda concept, I am sure a lot of delegates couldn’t help but return to their organisations with bigger ideas and a motivation to put them into practice.
It was against this background that I recently attended IBM’s 2009 ‘Information on Demand’ event (IOD2009) in Berlin, designed to bring together customers, partners and industry analysts like me to discuss information management related matters and how IBM technology and services are relevant to them.
The danger with such end-user oriented gatherings is that they are so often designed primarily to cater for the immediate needs of ‘the faithful’, i.e. existing customers that are already committed the vendor’s offerings, and just want to know about the latest releases and roadmaps, and perhaps have an opportunity to network and party with their peers.
Now I am not going to say that IOD2009 didn’t have an element of this. Indeed, I would have been worried if it didn’t as it’s important to keep customers in the loop and gather their feedback at a detailed product level. It is also extremely valuable when a vendor facilitates networking and knowledge exchange within its user and partner community. Beyond such essentials, however, it is nice when events push the out the boundaries, tackle some of the bigger questions and issues, and even promote some thought leadership and best practice. IOD2009 delivered on these things too.
One of the enabling factors here is the breadth and depth of the IBM information management portfolio. Unlike niche vendors who can only address one part of the problem, and therefore sometimes define the world in a very blinkered manner and skew conversations accordingly, IBM has the luxury of considering the bigger picture holistically, in the knowledge that it has solutions relevant to most parts of it. In addition, the presence of its professional services divisions helps it to maintain solid bridges between the PowerPoint-centric world of product management and the real world in which solutions must be made to work in practice.
The only thing that gets in the way, at least for a pragmatic Brit like me with simple working class roots, is the amount of management consulting speak that American IBM executives insist on using when articulating visions, problems and solutions. Having said this, you can get a pretty good feel for the central theme of IOD2009, the ‘Information Agenda’, from some of the sound bites and phrases used in various keynotes:
* Leverage information for smarter business outcomes
* Move from information based projects to an information based enterprise
* Effective analysis and decision making starts with trusted information
* Creating meaningful business insights is what matters
* Put new intelligence to work to achieve ongoing differentiation and market leadership
* From application led transformation to information led transformation
* Right information at the right time at the right point in the business process
* The workplace is everywhere so data needs to be available everywhere
* Become an intelligent company
These are from my notes, and while I may not have jotted all of them down exactly right, the flavour and sentiment of what the audience heard should be pretty clear.
The overriding message was to move forward from the fragmented way in which information has typically been managed and exploited in the past, and start joining the dots. There is an organisational value perspective to this, which centres on a view of information as an enterprise level asset with the potential to contribute a lot more benefit than is being realised today. The key here is to break down barriers and open up silos to generate more coherent higher level insights into performance and operations.
Related to this is the functional dimension, based on the argument that we can manage and exploit information more effectively if we coordinate policy and practice across storage, backup, archival, description, discovery, retrieval, search, analytics, access, delivery, and so on. The cost and risk benefits of such a coordinated approach are particularly relevant against the backdrop of the current economic and regulatory environment.
The Information Agenda represents a step forward for IBM in the way it articulates information related challenges and how its various products and services work together to help tackle them. IBM is not telling us anything we don’t already know in terms of defining the problem, and is certainly not the only vendor waking up to what’s required. But now it is getting its own act together in terms of joined up thinking and offerings, which is something it has sometimes struggled with in the past, it’s got to the stage where it really can help its customers to define or review their thoughts, priorities and plans in the bigger picture context.
The maturing of IBM’s approach around the Information Agenda concept therefore has to be welcomed. Suppliers that can see beyond point products and have a grown up conversation about pulling the relevant threads together in a practical way have much more to contribute.
With this in mind, I found the detailed breakout sessions dealing with best practice and cross domain views of the world particularly interesting at IOD2009. The traditional product oriented content was still there, but set against the backdrop of the holistic Information Agenda concept, I am sure a lot of delegates couldn’t help but return to their organisations with bigger ideas and a motivation to put them into practice.
Tuesday, June 09, 2009
A realistic exploration of the Desktop Linux opportunity
How often have you dismissed the views expressed by extremists because what they are saying is so far removed from your own position and perceptions? The problem is that while single issue activists can make a lot of noise, they often come across as being out of touch with the complexities of the real world. Indeed, the irony is that when idealism takes precedent over practicality, the cause being promoted is actually far less likely to strike a chord with the mainstream.
And so it has been with open source fundamentalists promoting desktop Linux as an alternative to the traditional Windows client platform. The starting point for the argument is typically that Windows is completely broken and the only reason people carry on using it is because they are lazy or have been brainwashed by the Redmond evil empire. Linux is then positioned as the answer to everyone’s problems based on technical superiority and the righteousness of open source.
It’s clear that a lot of evangelists espousing such views are enthusiasts that have adopted desktop Linux for their own personal use but have little experience of deploying it in a real world business environment. Indeed, locating objective information on the practicalities of using desktop Linux in a mainstream business context can be a challenge.
In order to tackle this problem, we at Freeform Dynamics tracked down over a thousand IT professionals who had done it for real and extracted a range of tips, tricks and traps from them – not at a techie level, but in relation to the scoping and targeting of activity, and how to work around things like application availability and compatibility constraints.
The feedback we received was received was remarkably candid, and confirmed that far from being perfect, desktop Linux brings with it a range of issues that need to be taken into account when considering its use. Nevertheless, there was a strong consensus that if deployed in the right way to the right kinds of user, Linux, and some of the open source applications that are typically used with it, can form a foundation for reducing the total cost of ownership (TCO) of the desktop computing environment.
One of the most interesting parts of the study was the light shed on the question of targeting. While experiences varied between organisations, it was clear that as of today, Linux is most appropriate for deployment to users with relatively simple and predictable requirements, such as transaction workers and general professional users. These groups tend to view the computer on their desk as simply a tool to get their jobs done, so are less likely to resist the change that Linux represents. They also tend to be dependent on a relatively small range of applications which keeps testing, porting and migration costs at a manageable level.
At the other end of the spectrum, the advice from those with experience was that groups to avoid are Windows power users, mobile workers and creative staff, who are much more of a challenge. This is because their needs are generally more demanding, more dynamic and less predictable, and there tends to be a higher degree of reliance on specific applications that not available on Linux.
While thinking about selective targeting based on such observations might seem pretty obvious, it’s all too common to hear desktop Linux being dismissed on the basis that it won’t work for those in finance who are addicted to Excel macros, or those in the marketing department who just couldn’t live without their PowerPoint animations.
The trick is to not to get distracted by such users and explore the possibilities associated with those, for example, who live in the ERP system or some other core application for most of their working day, with minimal requirements for sophisticated document authoring, etc. And in many organisations, these make up the majority of the user population.
If you’re interested in reading more, details of the study, which was sponsored by IBM as part of our Community Research Programme, are written up in a full report which is available for free download here.
And so it has been with open source fundamentalists promoting desktop Linux as an alternative to the traditional Windows client platform. The starting point for the argument is typically that Windows is completely broken and the only reason people carry on using it is because they are lazy or have been brainwashed by the Redmond evil empire. Linux is then positioned as the answer to everyone’s problems based on technical superiority and the righteousness of open source.
It’s clear that a lot of evangelists espousing such views are enthusiasts that have adopted desktop Linux for their own personal use but have little experience of deploying it in a real world business environment. Indeed, locating objective information on the practicalities of using desktop Linux in a mainstream business context can be a challenge.
In order to tackle this problem, we at Freeform Dynamics tracked down over a thousand IT professionals who had done it for real and extracted a range of tips, tricks and traps from them – not at a techie level, but in relation to the scoping and targeting of activity, and how to work around things like application availability and compatibility constraints.
The feedback we received was received was remarkably candid, and confirmed that far from being perfect, desktop Linux brings with it a range of issues that need to be taken into account when considering its use. Nevertheless, there was a strong consensus that if deployed in the right way to the right kinds of user, Linux, and some of the open source applications that are typically used with it, can form a foundation for reducing the total cost of ownership (TCO) of the desktop computing environment.
One of the most interesting parts of the study was the light shed on the question of targeting. While experiences varied between organisations, it was clear that as of today, Linux is most appropriate for deployment to users with relatively simple and predictable requirements, such as transaction workers and general professional users. These groups tend to view the computer on their desk as simply a tool to get their jobs done, so are less likely to resist the change that Linux represents. They also tend to be dependent on a relatively small range of applications which keeps testing, porting and migration costs at a manageable level.
At the other end of the spectrum, the advice from those with experience was that groups to avoid are Windows power users, mobile workers and creative staff, who are much more of a challenge. This is because their needs are generally more demanding, more dynamic and less predictable, and there tends to be a higher degree of reliance on specific applications that not available on Linux.
While thinking about selective targeting based on such observations might seem pretty obvious, it’s all too common to hear desktop Linux being dismissed on the basis that it won’t work for those in finance who are addicted to Excel macros, or those in the marketing department who just couldn’t live without their PowerPoint animations.
The trick is to not to get distracted by such users and explore the possibilities associated with those, for example, who live in the ERP system or some other core application for most of their working day, with minimal requirements for sophisticated document authoring, etc. And in many organisations, these make up the majority of the user population.
If you’re interested in reading more, details of the study, which was sponsored by IBM as part of our Community Research Programme, are written up in a full report which is available for free download here.
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