In my opinion, content is part of the “table stakes” offering. Creating compelling experiences that span multiple channels such as broadband, video and mobile will be a true differentiator. This is one of the reasons that we at Infosys have been investing in research projects for personal virtual libraries, products to easily port web content to video or mobile and enabling secure handoffs between network access modes. This involves getting closer to the connected home to enable easy transfer of content between those consumption mediums so current silos of content become transparent to the customer. It is taking the taking the talk of “anytime, anywhere” content and making it a simple reality or compelling experience for the end customer. One very good and simple example is the deployment of multi-room Digital Video Recorders. This is not cross-channel, but it is cross-location in the house and does not tie the user to a particular TV. It is a great experience for the customer. The winners in the Triple Play race will build more experiences like this to differentiate their offering while using content to establish market parity.
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The big question then becomes, “what value is there to claim?” for all of this investment. On the web, the market is already littered with point solutions and promises of ad funded models that have not delivered to expectations. Sure, there is uplift from new data plans from the operator to support social networking, but subscription revenue remains elusive while data usage then starts to rapidly increase. To use an example from a fixed line ISP, Plusnet in the UK released numbers showing that YouTube was consuming 17% of peak hour usage on their network, yet YouTube is still not even a large money maker for Google. I feel it is a great user base that has not been converted into a “consumer base”.
The answer is the creation of end to end thematic social networking portals for the customer. The thematic portals provide not only interaction, but context for relevant commerce, potential subscription revenue for high value content and targeted advertising since the audience is self-qualified. In my opinion, this mix of revenue streams will hold the greatest chance for success. A uniform and consistent, multi-screen experience completes the offering by making it easy for the consumer to interact via the modality that suits them best. The offering cannot be just another community that provides little marginal value.
Thoughts?
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There have been many announcements over the last year with Communications Service Providers providing access to popular social networking sites such as MySpace, Facebook, Bebo and others. In the short run, this provides potential subscription revenue and data plan uplift to drive average revenue per user. However, I still have many concerns with this approach in that it does not create differentiation or enable one of the Service Provider’s key assets, customer information, since the social networking sites are essentially closed “black box” solutions. Orange has just announced a service to consolidate social networking sites to enable the display of “popular functions of each site side by side so they can be accessed with one click… to send messages, upload photos and check status updates without having to browse individual URLs or log into separate sites” which I feel is a terrific step forward. This not only creates differentiation, but also a new customer experience to ease the issues with managing multiple social networking sites and puts the Orange brand in the front of that access portal. Essentially, this is having the original network provider manage these new networks in an efficient manner.
While the efforts mentioned above are interesting, I feel they still fall short due to the fact that the value of the social network, the information on member interactions or social graph, is still hidden from the Service Provider. The information is not combined with the vast amount of customer information already resident within the Service Provider’s own databases. Gaining access to that social graph would provide insights to key influencers and support rich campaign targeting, particularly when combined with data from the mobile web or IPTV platforms. This is one of the reasons Infosys has created a white-label offering for Service Providers to launch their own social networking platforms that would be integrated into their own customer information systems and assets, in addition to providing lifestyle themes such as sports, to provide purpose to those community interactions. It is my opinion that this model will create the most value to the service provider due to the rich customer information generated, the creation of new commerce and advertising opportunities, and the establishment of a hub to promote other value added services. What are your thoughts on this approach? I welcome the discussion.
]]>Being a pure play mobile operator in western markets seems to be getting harder each day. They already have to deal with considerable market penetration which impacts future growth, but now a few more pieces of news will further complicate matters. First, a new study by Multimedia Intelligence noted the teen market, a growth segment and consumer of data services, is nearing saturation in the US. Considering this is not a multiple handset customer segment, this is not good news for the operators. Second, Tariff Consultancy has a new report detailing the worldwide trend for unlimited bundles for voice and texts. These unlimited plans simply beg for cost undercutting and further put pressure on data services to make up the revenue. My last point has more implication for European operators where the EU regulator wants international roaming charges greatly reduced, currently a good revenue stream for the mobile operators. Saturated markets, supersized bundles and cheap roaming, not a good state of affairs.
All is not lost however, the forward looking operators are already tapping into emerging markets in the east (Vodafone), using new handsets to drive demand (ATT iPhone), consolidating competition (Verizon/Alltel), bundling landline (T-Mobile) or simply looking to drive new data services revenues with a portfolio approach. Pressure on the mobile operators is nothing new, what is the correct strategy? I welcome your comments.
]]>This is one of the promises of new technology enabling the delivery of enterprise application user experiences to mobile devices. Many front-of-house user experiences have been moving to web-based for PCs and mobile devices are now capable of adapting these interfaces based on device capabilities, user preferences and presence information. I’m not going to delve into this topic now but full mobile browsers, content translation middleware and new mobile operating systems are all aspects of this enabling set of technologies.
So what are some of the implications for companies? I have a couple of scenarios I would like to explore.
Many of you will be familiar with the concept of viral marketing for consumption products such as the cute girl at the bar who convinces you to try the latest mixed drink offering and offers to buy you one.
Now imagine you see the same girl at a bar with a great looking phone and you comment on it. They turn around and start telling you how good the phone is, show you how they watch TV on it, tell you all about the fantastic coverage, etc. She says there is a deal now and you can sign up online, in fact you can use her phone. She starts the process for you and talks you through it. She asks if you use a phone much for work. You do. She upgrades you to a business plan. You go through the last steps to confirm your purchase and pay for it. Five minutes later the girl has moved on and a few days later the phone arrives via post at your nominated address.
What enabled this scenario?
The crowd sourcing concept has been around for a while, particularly in the area of IT and home entertainment support. But the crowd-sourcing concept is primarily a hand-off concept.
In this scenario, a customer having support problems with their internet connection can use their mobile phone to ask for assistance. Based on their location information, a list of registered, available helpers are provided. The customer can initiate an SMS, voice or IM conversation with these crowd-sourced helpers based upon preferences. The helper can agree an appointment to come and check out their on premises equipment. Based upon their registration details, level of completed training and reputation with the provider, they have access to a restricted set of enterprise application functions. They assist the customer with problem resolution, making incident notes on their mobile device into the provider systems. They are able to see that the provider service in that area has scheduled maintenance which is due to finish in an hour. The helper returns to their home and updates the incident with further details via a richer PC based experience. He sends a notification to the customer when the maintenance work is completed to check if the internet is available again. It is. The customer problem is resolved, the registered helper charges an agreed fee for the service.
How was this scenario achieved?
These are just some basic ideas for how the traditional notion of fixed, large call centres can be broken down through mobilisation of enterprise applications. Large investment and operating costs can be moved to flexible, demand based cost. These scenarios can be carried further with some minor extensions including;
Hopefully companies can take advantage of these possibilities to deliver benefit to both shareholders and customers without being sold something every time we chat to a stranger in a bar.
]]>These behaviours are also moving out of just chatty girls and increasingly into our home and work, establishing the ability to communicate effectively across multi-channels and maintain multiple interactions as necessary skills for work and play – a new selection criteria in our human evolution.
To illustrate some of the concepts, I will be using mapping/location applications as an example. Ever since one of our ancestors stood up straight and started looking down to a 2-d surface, maps have been a concept we all "get" and have tended to be suitable for early adopters..be they Norse Vikings, Chinese Astronomers or Generation Y looking for the nearest pizza.
The first widely adopted incarnation of the "World Wide Web" - remember when you had to use the full name? - was premised on the ability to render content to a screen and use hyperlinks to navigate between different sets of content. The key aspect of this was that human's had to choose associations between data and navigate a path based on their interpretation. And it was people who had to draw the connections between two sets of content to come up with useful information.
To apply this to the mapping context, a person used to do something like the following;
Go to a directory listing site;
Choose the link for the category they were looking for;
If they were lucky, search for a name or, often the case back then, scroll through big long lists;
Select a listing, write down address.
Go to different site where images of maps were kept;
Search, or look up index, for street name to find out which map page it was on;
Select map page;
Use the map coordinates to find the street on the image and then work and, if they were lucky, roughly where the number would be; and
If you wanted directions, link through several pages of map images trying to trace back to your place.
Wow - did we really do all that once?
The key aspects of this are that humans provided the ability to correlate information, resolve location information and persist results. Computers and the internet merely served to store and serve content and links to content.
Some people reading this will never even have experienced that process, for them Web 2.0 style interaction is all they have known. But what is different about Web 2.0 from this perspective of human, computer and network interaction. I'm not going to talk about AJAX, JSON and a myriad of other technology labels - see here if you want that - or even about definitions of Web 2.0 - everyone seems to have agreed O'Reilly nailed that one.
]]> From my perspective, the fundamentals of Web 2.0 have been around for a long time - hand's up who is used the AsyncResult property on the XMLDOM object using JavaScript in the late 90s and didn't bother naming it after a soap power? However, it is really the maturation of social awareness and expectation around the human-computer interaction and what applications on the "Web" (one word") can do that has led to this re-branding of the internet platform.The key change in this new version is that the data retrieved by Web resources can now be structured by programmers. Computers have always been able to store structured data but previously content accessed over the web was fairly loose, being mainly text and formatting. Standardisation on XML and its plethora of descendants has enabled application developers to access that structured data.
Application developers are then able to develop associations with structured data which can be processed computationally, obviating the need for a human to write something down and go to another location to find the correlating piece of data. Two - or more - pieces of correlated data become information which can be immediately understood and processed by the human brain. And the final shift in this new model is that applications can expose forms to update these data records. Wiki's, blogs, video sites, etc are all really just data entry sites to which we can append text or binary objects.
So what does this mean to our mapping example? A new interaction looks something like this;
User goes to favorite search/locator application;
User enters in key information such as category, area - so far not much change;
Application invokes search function and retrieves a set of listings, addresses and map locator information. Application invokes map function to retrieve map of area. Application processes set of listings and projects onto map function. Application renders map with markers for listings. This is the equivalent of reaching step (h) in the previous flow;
I won’t elaborate on finding directions, etc because the point is how much of the processing of data to information has shifted from human to the application. And computers are really good at doing that. The other interesting little aside about mapping applications in this context is that I can start contributing to that data, for example how Google Maps is supporting location editing using Wiki-style functions. This interaction concept didn't even exist in the 3-named internet world but highlights the interaction shift when even maps encourage contribution. I'm not sure Columbus wanted everyone in his crew having a crack at the charts but it really is a brave new world.
Finally, I wanted to postulate a little on what all this might mean for the next generation of Web applications - 3.0 (ugh), Semantic Web, whatever you call it. The big paradigm shift which is going to change how computers and humans interact is when intent and meaning can be represented in standard forms which are understandable by computers.
In this situation, applications as we understand them will become fundamentally altered. Rather than having a static set of services which are invoked and rendered to present information, platforms will become composers, retrieving the information you want, rendered in the way you want and, most importantly, monetized in the way you permit.
Speculating a little bit, a mapping interaction might look something like this;
Ask computer/device to Find Restaurant;
Computer looks up ontology as a resources, interprets Restaurant as of type Place and as having a collection of Styles;Computer looks up Restaurant.Styles in your profile information;
Computer knows "Place" is a location asks the "cloud" for a directory service based on your preferences - i.e accuracy is important (if your in China you want a Chinese service, in Italy an Italian one), want to be able to see ratings, happy to see ads to pay for use, preferred mapping application to use - "FaceMaps" for arguments sake;
Computer receives service interface definition and invokes directory request with information from your profile and current location;
Computer receives locations and information about local restaurants that suit your taste. Address information may be of type ChinaAddress and your mapping application may only support Address so computer does typecasting of address lists into the call for your preferred mapping application;
Computer renders map showing locations of restaurants, with advertising along bottom to support the cost of the request.
User eats at the best ranked restaurant of their favorite style after one click.
Now all this seems very similar to what can be done today, and to be honest, a good programmer could go and build an application that does this similar processing with lots of framework API and translation functions etc. But in the next version of information processing on the web, it should not be required. People will used their preferred composition containers probably much like browsers today and ask for what they want. Networked systems will be able to leverage their massive distributed computing power to understand intent and meaning, delivering unprecedented and unimaginable nformation processing capability into the hands of every person with a device.
We just have to be careful of what we ask for. Anyone remember Skynet?
]]>There has been much written on this generational gap and what it means for employers, governments and society.However, I just wanted to post some thoughts on what this means to the Digital Migrant(DMs) parents of a Digital Native(DN).
These parents are outside their comfort zone, they have no frame of reference to their own childhood, they struggle to understand the technology and advice from their own parents is likely to be wildly off the mark.
The first instinct of parents is to protect, from all the well-documented threats of online predators, cyber bullying, scam artists etc. In addition to this natural reaction, DMs will refer back to their own childhood activities, encouraging their DN to play outside, go for a bikeride, have friends over, etc. And it all seem like sensible, responsible parenting.
However, these actions neglect one of the principle obligations of a parent, to nurture and develop their offspring into a functioning, contributing individuals as adults. And here the DMs are hamstrung. Their legacy concept of identity is no longer adequate.
]]> The introduction of continuous connectivity, virtual worlds, social networks and increasing amount of personal data persisted in the cloud has extended what it means to exist. A DN is not just the little bundle of joy - or collection of moodswings - which learns, eats, sleeps and plays in the physical world. Part of who they are is always on 24/7, 365 days a year, either as a social network profile which is making new friends and being extended by the network, or as an electronic avatar which is representing them in virtual worlds or just a set of preferences collecting RSS feeds.
These may be relatively trivial and debatable extensions of "identity" but when these DNs grow up, this information and internet history will develop, along with technology sophistication, to produce one or more avatars which acts based on reputation, can negotiate to suit preferences, can coordinate play or work. Our online representation will become an important and critical part of who we are. It's hard when your computer crashes, imagine how would your son or daughter feel if their avatar "died"?
So I challenge parents to get out of their comfort zone and find a balance between protectionism and encouragement of their children. Careful planning, monitoring and oversight of their online existence can define a new kind of space, just like the backyard or park, where they can develop life skills and grow as personalities. The adult world for their lifetimes is mostly beyond our imagining, but at least we can prepare them to follow their dreams.
People are constantly impressed by the ever increasing complexity, sophistication and capability of mobile phones. The introduction of the iPhone and whispers/shouts on the grapevine of the gPhone are redefining people's expectations. But is this next stage of development the beginning of the end in innovation or just the end of the beginning?
To answer that question we only have to look at the trajectory of innovation in that truly revolutionary device, the PC. During their history, PCs have undergone several periods of consumerisation and attempts at diversity - Newton, the NetPC, even good old Wang, all spring to mind. However, the PC is now universally defined in terms of a set of numbers - Memory, HD capacity, processor power, battery life, etc. These numbers are all that is important on a device. In addition to these numbers you have a keyboard, a mouse and a screen.
]]> This is the future of mobile devices. Just that the consumer has some new twists on old questions;Mobile devices are becoming thin, standardised resource containers. There will be some innovation and brand differentiation through design - look no further than the Apple iPhone - and consumerisation will continue apace. But for all Apple's reemergence in the personal computer space, it's software and applications which drive the user experience. Apple and Intel have stopped slugging it out and now Microsoft is the target of advertising about the "lame" PC. Both companies know it is the applications which attract customers, no matter how many shades of lime your PC box comes in.
For a long time carriers have not bothered too much about this trend. Phones were cool gadgets to get people on access and usage plans and carriers were able to build their walled gardens as the only wireless access game in town. However, with the increasing penetration of Wi-Fi, Web 2.0 and improved browser capabilities, the rules of the game have changed.
Web 2.0 and heightened browser capabilities expose carriers to the threat of becoming commodity wireless pipes. And with number portability and ease of churn, customers will seek access on the lowest price, which may even be over local Wi-Fi. Imagine making voice calls using a web-based soft-client over Wi-Fi using an iTouch with a microphone plugged in!
Web 2.0 is particularly challenging, as it enables all services - voice, video, data - to be delivered over any Internet connection. As long as a connection can be made over HTTP (and therefore IP) between a client device and an application server anywhere the possibilities are limitless.
This creates an imperative for the Telco community to regain control. If you can manage in the network the user experience than you regain the upper hand in determining the customer experience. An example of this is the carrier's threat to de-prioritise Google traffic. Would YouTube be the most popular video sharing site on the web if it was also the slowest? (For an interesting sidebar discussion on this topic, check out this blog on Net Neutrality)
The core concept of the IMS network - separation of Transport, Access and Service - into separate layers makes sense to address this challenge. Transport already is a commodity and has been for some time. Access is still a Telco strength but is increasingly an area of collaboration rather than competition, with operators offering wireline and wireless access anywhere through network partnerships to offset the cost of building and maintaining multiple, full-coverage networks.
The Service is what the customer experiences, be it voice, data, video or a combination. Controlling the customer experience means access to the customer wallet. By separating this out from the Access and Transport, operators are able to serve up compelling customer experiences anywhere, anytime and on any device.
In a previous blog, I made an effort to put forward a framework for understanding customer value in a converged world. The key elements of this framework were;
By controlling the delivery of the Experience, operators are also uniquely positioned to understand and tailor the experience based on Presence. Operators have a jump start on the competition with regards to identity management (see Lightreading Report here) and obviously have access to location and time information through their access networks - be it fixed line positioning or mobile cell tower location. The combination of Experience and Presence control/ownership provides a strong bargaining position in negotiating with content providers.
However, all of this is at risk from Web 2.0 and innovative application providers unless Telco operators can move quickly to define the rules of the next-generation communication game. Carriers must invest in new network architectures to ensure their ownership of the burgeoning wireless and mobile content markets is retained.
]]>In response to these trends, Infosys believes Online Directories need to respond the increasing appetite of small and medium business advertisers for Immediacy, Transparency and Collaboration.1. Increased availability and adoption of high-speed broadband across tethered and un-tethered access technologies;
2. Increased access to and adoption of technology to empower individual users to create, manage and distribute digital content; and
3. Increasing sophistication and heightened expectations in relation to the Internet experience.
Immediacy – Enables the advertiser to manage their content, promotions and advertising spend via self-service. This allows immediate response to the customer behaviour or business situation. This may include the ability for an advertiser to upload videos for immediate display or real-time campaign messages – i.e a “Happy Hour Now” label appearing in their ad from 5pm daily;
Transparency – Providers an advertiser with insight into their advertising spend efficiency, consumer behaviour and market effectiveness. Coupled with immediacy this empowers SMB advertisers to maximize their return on advertising spend; and
Collaboration – Combines the advertiser need with Online Directory expertise and services to achieve the optimal outcome. For example, an Online Directory may introduce a post-processing service for user-generated content to ensure a high-quality experience for end-users across all channels and devices. This ensures satisfaction of both Advertiser and User as well as increasing revenue for the Online Directory service.
This creates an opportunity for Online Directory services to achieve the following;
For further reading and examples on this subject, Infosys recommends the following Wall Street Journal article : http://online.wsj.com/article/SB119067940363238120.html
This is born out by a brief overview of two Gartner Hype Cycle reports;
So everyone agrees that the expectations and maturity of understanding around IMS and Web 2.0 are at different stages, but these are fundamentally different technologies and concepts. So why are people discussing Web 2.0 as an alternate strategy to IMS?
It is important to understand these technologies individually before they can be compared;
So if these concepts, technologies and architectures are so different, what is it about them that is similar enough that their being discussed in the some breath? Because they both, in theory, allow CSPs to rapidly define and deploy new applications and services. Tech savvy customers , both consumers and enterprise, are demanding new, innovative services be delivered faster to retain their loyalty.
With IMS trailing in customer expectations, CSPs are looking at Web 2.0 technology to deliver immediate benefits and address time to market challenges. Web 2.0 is particularly good at tackling these problems because of its simplicity and the ubiquity of internet connectivity which enables the development of RIAs. Typical CSP services - voice telephony, video delivery, data services, etc - can all be delivered as applications which capture content (voice, video, etc), digitize it and route it onto the internet over a broadband data service. Client applications and application servers can be developed to mimic the functions of a carrier, i.e. routing, connection control, buffering to improve quality of service, etc.
The final advantage of Web 2.0 technologies is that so many systems have been connected by the internet and functionality exposed that there is a vast reservoir of "low-hanging fruit" - restaurant locations, weather data, map data, newspapers, etc - that people are rapidly mashing together in new and innovative ways which is creating a lot of excitement around Web 2.0.
This means that potentially all the quad-play services being chased by carriers could potentially be enabled as applications, packaging their data over a single telecommunications service, the data pipe. In fact, as carriers deliver faster broadband speeds due to customer demand, they are enabling the commoditization of bandwidth. We are all familiar with large enterprises today which have extremely high speed internet services over which they bundle all their voice, video conference and data services, at relatively low cost.
How much bandwidth does a consumer need? 20 MBs? 100MBs? 1 Gig? At what point does quality of service control in the network become irrelevant? Once they lose the value of network management within the core, CSPs become marginalized to providing a high speed, commodity data service with no ownership of the customer experience. The new, innovative application players will be creating customer value and owning the experience (and therefore the advertising dollars).
As ominous as this sounds, there are saving graces for carriers. Customers want to be able to use any device, anywhere. They want to be able to make a phone call without being dependent on high speed internet, they want to be able to call people who are on legacy network infrastructure and they increasingly want multiple-access solutions such as fixed-mobile convergence. These are not low hanging fruit for Web 2.0 but are addressable through adoption of an IMS architecture. It should be noted that these issues are not impossible to address through Web 2.0 technologies and application management services but they are non-trivial.
In conceiving innovative services and bringing them to market we need to balance the convenience and immediate power of Web 2.0 against the need and potential value of applications supported by an IMS network.
]]>In order to achieve this desired differentiation and develop customer experience leadership, telcos must revisit their customer business process strategy through various phases of acquisition, retention and cross/up-sell. Telcos must adopt sound discipline around business process management and look at various business processes that interact with the customer and process attributes that impact the end customer experience.
The impact to the end customer experience can be defined by analyzing following four process attributes
Usability stresses on the user friendliness of the process. This goes on to analyze user experience design and minimizing number of interfaces to get to the relevant information. Timeliness is dictated by customer needs. Too early or too late has adverse impact on customer experience. Completeness requires the solution to be complete and fit for the purpose and customer. Adaptability means that processes must be repeatable yet flexible to accommodate unexpected events.
Business process management has been around for a long time but largely confined to the engineering world and more focussed on improving operational cost efficiencies. There is a need for a fresh approach to process redesign with focus on prioritizing key customer impacting business processes and improving customer experience attributes for these processes. Such process analysis should also be supplemented by identifying the intended customer behaviour across various customer micro segments and touch-points. Having a consistent process base yet differentiated for customer segments will propel Telco’s operational agility to the next level and improve business performance by attracting and retaining most profitable customers.
]]>Hence to stay ahead and be sucessful It is imperative for all B2B business to embrace this framework and mould their strategies accordingly.
Let me introduce to you Ankur Bhan who will share with his thoughts on 'Customer Centric Strategy to Business Process Redesign'. Ankur Bhan is a Principal with the CSP Solutions Consulting group of Infosys Technologies Limited. Ankur is a Solutions Consultant responsible for sales and marketing of Infosys solutions offerings around business process design and customer experience management for telecom service providers. Ankur is a Telecom specialist and advises clients on customer and revenue growth strategies, systems and process evolution and operational efficiencies. Recent projects include Billing operations effectiveness assessment and strategy development for a Tier 1 service provider in Europe, leading a team of consultants for BSS transformation program, and designing comprehensive business planning processes for IP and data network operations.
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Just because something is new, or sexy, doesn't make it a killer app or the "next big thing". A company needs a way of assessing the value of their communication services offerings and opportunities for innovation without resulting in costly duplication.
Value of the consumer communication experience can be defined in reference to the following three aspects;
A consumer in assessing a providers value will look at each of these aspects and ask themselves relevant questions;
Often the answers to these questions present a fractured picture. A consumer can access some of the content, some of the time and sometimes its easy. Much like providers themselves the industry is still very siloed in the value they provide - cable operators have better sport, telco carriers provide better quality of service for telephony, media operators have stronger content ecosystems. Customers are refusing the triple/quad-play path simply because the value to the consumer is not provided.
How can operators/providers improve the consumer value of their offerings. Consider each of the aspects of consumer value - Presence, Experience and Content - as circles whose size is determined by maturity and breadth;
This framework for understanding consumer value is a start for operators and providers to consistently evaluate their value proposition and asses the impact of market strategy on that value proposition. The broader and more mature your services are in these aspects, the more concrete and compelling is the value to each consumer.
Having conceptualized and assessed the consumer value proposition, the next challenge comes in developing a platform which enables a competitive value chain to optimize cost, provide personalized/differentiated offers and support the rapid innovation demanded by today's customers.
But that's a subject for another day, another blog.
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