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THE TRILLION-DOLLAR QUESTION
QUICK INSIGHTS
INNOVATION
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INNOVATION:THE TRILLION-DOLLAR QUESTION
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INNOVATION:
THE TRILLION-DOLLAR QUESTION
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Page 4 Executive summary
Page 6 Section 1
A question of culture
Page 9 Section 2
How can service providers innovate?
Page 13 Section 3
General principles of innovation
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INNOVATION:THE TRILLION-DOLLAR QUESTION
This Quick Insights report was inspired by
the diverse and animated T8 debate between
more than 30 top communications industry
executives held at TM Forum’s Management
World 2011 in Dublin in May. There was
general agreement that change is necessary
and urgent, and that innovation is the key.
This was underlined in a report published
at the beginning of June 2011 by Juniper
Research. It stated that revenues billed by
operators will be more than $1 trillion annually
by 2016, but that mobile network operators’
costs will exceed revenues within four years
unless they take action.
Against this background of soaring costs,
we are moving into a new era. “Users will
want any type of information at any time on
any device they choose, sometimes while
doing 140km [almost 90 miles] an hour on the
autobahn or freeway – it’s our job as engineers
and technologists to be ingenious and figure
out how we are going to enable this,” was how
the CTO of one of the world’s largest telecoms
groups put it. No doubt the speaker’s CFO is
equally exercised about how they are going to
make a sustainable profit from doing it.
This report seeks to look at barriers that are
preventing progress, present some different
approaches to this trillion-dollar question, andcover some general principles of innovation.
Section 1 looks at barriers to innovation
within operators. These are largely due to
corporate culture, which, since the financial
crisis that started in 2008, appears to have
become conservative and inward looking.
The emphasis seems to be on ‘keeping your
head down’ rather than doing anything to
draw unwanted attention to oneself by putting
forward ideas that run contrary to day-to-day
operations or corporate trends.
Grand corporate plans and the boardroom
are rarely the birthplaces of innovation,
but if properly run, they should provide an
environment in which innovation is possible
and nurtured. Ideas that are massively
successful are often incidental or accidental, or
just plain lucky, and timing is all.
Don’t worry that you don’t know exactly
what you’re looking for, just have the wits
to recognize the possibilities of a good idea
when you see one and the courage to try it
out. In particular, realize that putting out ‘work
in progress’ is a great idea. Google+ is a great
example – you’ll never get a bigger lab than the
outside world or better feedback than from the
general public. It might not be polite or what
you were expecting, but that doesn’t matter.
A great example of user feedback spawning
a massively successful business is how one
of the world’s largest payments-handling
companies grew out of a single-currency,
premature, e-commerce initiative after it
became clear from early-adopter, overseas
users (who were not even the intended
audience) that there was huge demand for
a cross-currency processing facility. As one
financial services industry veteran observed
wryly, any of the banks “could have set up
such a service on a single PC” at that timein the mid-1990s, “but they didn’t because
they were institutionally unable to grasp the
opportunity – and promptly lost out on a
multi-billion dollar market.”
Failure can be positive, if handled in the right
way (fail small, fail quickly and learn well) and
not knowing exactly what you are looking for
is fine. These notions are supported by two
powerful books published in the last year by
heavy-hitting economists John Kay and Tim
Harwood. After all, SMS and prepay are great
Executive summary
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INNOVATION:THE TRILLION-DOLLAR QUESTION
The biggest message that came out of the T8’s
lively discussion at TM Forum’s Management
World 2011 on Breaking the innovation barrier
is the urgent need for innovation within service
providers to enable new services and revenue
streams.
The urgency was underlined by Juniper
Research’s* findings published the week after
the T8 meeting. It stated that revenues billed by
operators will be more than $1 trillion annually
by 2016, but that mobile network operators
face a ‘nightmare scenario’ whereby their costs
will be greater than revenues within four years
unless they take action.
Against this backdrop of soaring costs, other
tough challenges must be faced, such as users
wanting any type of information, at any time, on
any device. Operators need to enable this, but
also make a sustainable profit.
Clearly there are no simple answers to this
trillion-dollar question of how service providers
can become more innovative; the upside is
there is no shortage of ideas either. To some
extent, they are all affected by the corporate
culture of network operators, which is typically
conservative.
The web has changed our perceptions and
values so much – as consumers of all kinds
of web services, in the mid-1990s, we quicklylearned that ‘best effort’ services were perfectly
acceptable when they were free to the user. The
same still applies: We realize that cheap or free
apps might not work perfectly, but who cares?
They’re fun or useful (or they’re not and we
dump them immediately) and we’ll be moving
onto the something else next week anyway.
Almost all search results make money for
someone, somewhere (just how finely tuned
this business has become since search became
personalized at the end of 2009 is spelled out
in a jaw-dropping book, The Filter Bubble: What
the Internet is Hiding from You by Eli Pariser,
published in May 2011), but most of us don’t
care so long as we find what we thought we
were looking for, or at least are happy with what
is served up to us.
Although this process of shifting acceptance
has been going on for over a decade, on the
whole, network operators continue to behave
as though it hasn’t happened. For example, we
should be prepared to launch imperfect products
into the outside world, stating that they are
work in progress, then invite feedback from
users, as Google has with Google+ in July 2011,
in a bid to compete against Facebook. Google’s
attitude is, ‘this is work in progress, tell us what
we can do and what you’d like to see’: You can’t
get a bigger lab than the outside world, nor a
bigger sample of public opinion.
Feedback from users might not be polite
or what you were expecting, but it will be
instructive if you can take the information
onboard. This is difficult for operators with their
heritage of five nines’ reliability, and typically an
inward-looking monoculture.
Yet the rewards of acting on such feedback
can be huge. A great example of this is that
one of the world’s largest payments-handling
companies grew out of a single-currency,premature, e-commerce initiative after it
became clear from early-adopter, overseas users
(who were not even the intended audience) that
there was huge demand for a cross-currency
processing facility. As one financial services
industry veteran observed wryly, any of the
banks “could have set up such a service on a
single PC” at that time in the mid-1990s, “but
they didn’t because they were institutionally
unable to grasp the opportunity – and promptly
lost out on a multi-billion dollar market.”
A question of culture
Section 1
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Communication with and from
the highest level is very important
Part of that institutionalized resistance to
change or innovation is the work ethic across
service providers’ workforces, which tends to
be ‘keep your head down’ and do what you’re
told, rather than put new ideas forward. The
thinking is that it’s better not to be a tall poppy,
they are always the ones to get their heads
lopped off: don’t go against the wishes and
instructions of your line manager or the trends
in corporate thinking, in the interests of hanging
onto your job.
Indeed those at the coal-face, staff dealing with
customers all day every day, don’t necessarily
have any idea what the corporate thinking on
any given line of business is because of a lack of
communication, leadership and direction.
In contrast, it is interesting that the
heads of the most successful companies in
communications – such as the top guns at
Apple, Amazon, Google, Facebook and so on
– are household names. This is not the case
with the most senior executives at network
operators, even though without them and the
infrastructure and services provided by their
companies, none of the rest could have been so
innovative or successful.
Communication with and from the highest
level is very important. If a complaint or positive
feedback has to travel through 14 layers of
management before it hits the CEO, the
organization is heading for big trouble. Yet many
network operators’ management structure
is hierarchical, without a mechanism for vital
information, such as what customers think,
to be fed to those who have the power todo something about it. Instead, people with
original ideas are often viewed as upstarts
and trouble-makers.
TM Forum’s Rob Rich, Managing Director
of our Insights Research unit and customer
experience guru, was only partly joking when
he recently quipped, “Why aren’t we seeing
operators appoint Chief Customer Officers?”.
It’s a great question. He added, “The more
stove pipes you have, the more you need one.”
It turns out he’s not the only one thinking along
these lines – just as this report went to press on
July 7, Telstra announced it had done just that –
see Section 2 for more details.
Innovation does not usually arise from grand
plans or board meetings, anything but. It’s often
incidental or accidental or just plain lucky, and
timing is all. The point is not to worry that you
don’t know exactly what you’re looking for, just
have the wits to recognize the possibilities of
a good idea when you see one and have the
courage to try it out.
This is illustrated over and over again in two
highly readable, but learned books by a pair of
economists: Obliquity: Why our goals are best
achieved indirectly by John Kay of the Financial
Times , published in 2010, and Tim Harwood’s
Adapt: Why Success Always Starts with Failure ,
published in May 2011.
Kay argues that the direct, grand plan
approach is generally doomed to failure because
the types of problems the human race is
struggling with – whether military, economic,
environmental or commercial, among others –
are too complex to model accurately. This leads
to inaccurate abstraction, the very opposite of
intuition, feel and insight. Yet the latter are what
operators need if they are to launch rafts of new
services to please and attract customers and
bring the sustainably profitable, new revenue
streams they so desire and need.
Kay wheels out many highly lucid and
entertaining arguments to support his theory
that any organization whose overwhelming goal
is to make money at all costs will fail. In the
last three years, the banking world is notshort of examples.
To adapt his line of thought to the question in
hand here – how network operators can become
more innovative – we should start with how we
can make our customers happy and appeal to
new ones, so that they stay with us and spend
more money. That is giving them what they
want, when they want it at an affordable price
by thinking about them first, rather than being
bound by the dictates of corporate culture and
heritage, and its inherent fear of failure.
“Innovation does not
usually arise from
grand plans or board
meetings, anything but.
It’s often incidental or
accidental or just plain
lucky, and timing is all.”
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INNOVATION:THE TRILLION-DOLLAR QUESTION
The key here is to be prepared to fail and
often, but fail small-scale, fail fast, learn from
it and move on, which is a very different
attitude to the one that has prevailed in our
industry. There is a long list of high-profile
marketing initiatives that have failed, slowly and
expensively, in the quest to come up with ‘killer
applications’ because they were out of step with
what users wanted, highlighting the dangers of
an inward-looking culture.
Or, as Harwood explains with great clarity
in his book, fear of failure paradoxically often
leads to greater and more dangerous failures.
Rather the key to success is an ability to adapt,
improvise and accept mistakes.
One T8 attendee advised that before spending
millions on a marketing campaign, “do internal
testing, if it doesn’t gain traction in-house, it
won’t succeed in the outside world, so start
something else.”
Not that innovative ideas necessarily have to
be home-grown. They don’t. Often they come
from small, nimble start-ups that we should
recognize as being potential partners. Service
providers have the reach, scale, infrastructure
and associated systems and functions (such as
billing and security measures) these small, new
players need to get out there.
Innovation is about the way we use and
monetize these unrivaled assets to deliver value
to customers fast. We need to be much, much
more receptive to new partners – rather than
seeing them as a commercial threat or invadersof our long-established systems and processes.
To ensure we don’t suffer ‘organ rejection’ –
that is reject anything that didn’t originate with
us – we need to figure out how best to enable
their ideas, please our customers and ultimately
make a profit for all parties.
Yet operators could be making much more
progress on the partnership front. Part of the
problem is that it is the norm in the industry to
award CxO level personnel multi-million dollar
bonuses for short-term results, rather than for
their plans for where the service provider will
be in 10 years’ time. Certainly it is easier to
continue to do what we’ve always done than
move out of our comfort zone, but that move
is inevitable.
As well as having to work with partners
to gain access to sustainable new revenue
streams, the industry will be obliged to work
more closely with partners that it considers
rivals in other circumstances. For example,
enabling partners that compete with your
own retail chain to use your network to act
as a mobile virtual network operator. This is
happening in some countries already.
We will also be obligated, to a greater or
lesser extent, “to get used to sharing a base
station tower and other infrastructure with
your enemy.” We need to start thinking the
unthinkable, as other industries have already
been forced to do.
In the airline industry, it used to be
unthinkable that an airline wouldn’t own its own
fleet of aircraft, and after that it was unthinkable
that it didn’t maintain its own aircraft, nowadays
it only ‘owns’ the pilots and frontline staff.
That’s it.
The world has changed, and we have to
change with it. The good news is that we can.
There are lots and lots of options. It’s worth
remembering that not so very long ago, Apple
looked to be in grave danger of extinction. It
went on to reshape the music business, alter
the mobile landscape beyond recognition andchange the face of the personal computer.
In the next section we look at a range of
different approaches to the question of how
service providers can embrace innovation.
* http://juniperresearch.com/viewpressrelease.
php?pr=245
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INNOVATION:THE TRILLION-DOLLAR QUESTION
“Another approach is to
make the most of the
talents and motivation of
the ‘awkward squad’ –
those worrisome people
with ideas – by setting
up a largely separate
incubator or subsidiary.”
cry in our beer about. I do think that services
like Google and other over-the-top (OTT)
services create demand for the underlying
capabilities. If those underlying capabilities
are merely moving the bit around, we’ll see
that big squeeze. The question is what other
underlying capabilities are there, that we can
do better at scale that those OTT players can’t
and will pay us to do for them? Authentication
and identity is a prime example, there are
others too.
How can I look to work with those OTT
players? I don’t care where the traffic comes
from, I just want more of it to fill my pipes.
If you expand that thinking, as most of our
economy moves to a digital base over the next
five to 10 years, all those capabilities – not
just moving bits, but all those transactions
– all those customer relationships, all those
identification and authentication pieces, if you
only took a fraction of a penny for each of
them, you’d be a very rich company, hoping
and praying for more Googles to come along,
because they would create more traffic for you.
The incubator route
Another approach is to make the most of
the talents and motivation of the ‘awkward
squad’ – those worrisome people with ideas
– by sett ing up a largely separate incubator
or subsidiary that protects them and their
ideas from the constraints of the parent
organization’s potentially stifling culture. Thisis a route recommended by Tim Harwood,
author of the just published book, Adapt: Why
Success Always Starts with Failure.
One large operator has successfully deployed
a leadership development program whereby
each year, 25 of the most promising young
workers are chosen to spend 10 months
overseas, full-time, on a management course,
working within operators in the U.S. They then
return to their employer and apply what they
have learned.
Managers are not allowed to stop their staff
from applying for a position on the program, and
so far it has been very successful, with more
than 150 people having completed it. A key part
of this is ensuring that when they return to the
company, they are integrated fully with it and
their fellow employees, rather allowing an elite,
separate ‘club’ to form, causing resentment and
resistance among colleagues.
Strong leadership is an essential ingredient
to ensure that an incubator approach and/or
applying knowledge from an external source
(such as the overseas assignments) within an
organization are successful.
The perception is that there are too many
managers and not enough leadership. Service
providers need a strong person at the head
of the company to support these disruptive
practices and processes, preferably one whose
chief concern is not finance, which is exactly
what Telstra has just announced (see next
paragraph).
Putting the customer first, institutionally
As reported in The Sydney Morning Herald on
July 7, as part of its transformation process,
Australia’s biggest operator, Telstra, “has
brought all staff dealing directly with customers
into one division and reduced the number
of managing directors who report directly to
the chief executive, as it shifts away from its
engineering and network functions.
“Consumer, government and businesscustomers will be the responsibility of a single
sales and service division, headed by recent
recruit Gordon Ballantyne, who also assumes
the title of chief customer officer.”
This is part of Telstra CEO David Thodey’s
plan to focus more on marketing and new
digital businesses. This is definitely a
development to watch and it will be interesting
to see if any other operators take the same
course of action, although as always, the
execution is all.
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Welcoming ideas from across the
organization is an intelligent approach
Role models
It is important to provide good models for
new ways of thinking and working so that
others “get to feel and behave like them” and
understand that they too can make a difference
if they go about it the ‘right’ way.
Welcoming ideas from across the entire
organization is an intelligent approach on the
grounds that“it is arrogant of any function to
assume it has all the answers.” But as one
delegate observed, “A good idea can come
from anywhere, but you need to productize and
monetize it – that’s where innovation comes in.”
Social networking
One way to go about collecting ideas is by
using a social networking type-tool right across
the workforce to discover what needs to be
done, as one T8 attendee explained – from
changes in technology and pricing to interface
updates. Apparently this attracts “thousands of
ideas annually... maybe we end up following up
15 of them, some long term and some short.”
The social networking approach works
in improving day-to-day operations too,
to the tune of millions of dollars, as Lee
Scargall, Group Director of Enterprise Risk
Management, explains in the TM Forum Case
Study Handbook (page 10), published in spring
2011, which is free to members to download
from our website.
Scargall says, “We’ve implemented a wiki
where staff can exchange information andideas. In addition, we have also enabled tweet
alerts, and online chat capability so we can
share information across the group in real
time. This is particularly important when we
are dealing with fraud, so having the ability to
share vital information quickly can be critical in
preventing leakage.”
He continues, “The more you know about
fraudsters’ activities across different territories,
the stronger the position you are in to counter
them. Developing a group mentality is very
important, people need to feel they are part of
one team all moving in the same direction, and
we want to embed this in our culture.”
Clearly it works. Scargall is leading a three-
year program based on TM Forum’s Revenue
Assurance Maturity Model* to add $105 million
annually to the bottom line by 2012. The group
exceeded its targets in terms of revenue
recovery within the first year, with over
$50 million added to the bottom line.
For more information about how your
organization can benefit, contact Toni Graham,
Head of the Business Benchmarking Program,
via: tgraham@tmforum.org
Small ideas can have big consequences
The scale and scope of innovation caused
dissent in the T8 debate. Some insisted that
innovation doesn’t have to be about drastic
shifts that seek to overturn or radically change
the culture. One delegate suggested that
operator should try, for instance, cutting
roaming costs by a factor of 10, in a relatively
small market without legacy systems that
would make the provisioning too difficult, to
see if increased usage would drive more than
10 times the previous roaming revenue.
Although the fight for capital is often won by
those who can bring incremental improvements
and savings that will have an impact in the near
future, others thought this was wrong-headed.
One argued, “New ways of making money are
not just about fiddling with existing tariffs, butoriginal thinking. As of 15 months ago, M-PESA
in Kenya makes more money for Vodacom than
it makes from SMSs.”
Yet in a way, this is the same argument
put slightly differently: what look like small,
incremental changes to an industry that
operates on such a huge scale can make even
a brilliant new idea (like M-PESA was back in
March 2007 at its launch) look insignificant.
It is worth noting that despite the staggering
success of M-PESA, payments is an area that
*http://www.tmforum.org/
RevenueAssuranceBusiness/
2140/home.html and http://www.tmforum.org/BestPracticesStandards/
RevenueAssuranceMaturity/
11150/Home.html
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INNOVATION:THE TRILLION-DOLLAR QUESTION
operators have, in general, seemingly beenreluctant to get involved with and progress
has been slow. This is despite the fact, for
instance, that in the European Union, big
changes to banking regulation in 2009 mean
operators don’t need to partner with banks to
provide payment services in Europe, but can do
it on their own behalf.
While the communications industry has
been hesitating, Google has announced it
will provide point of sale (POS) terminals
free for a contactless mobile payments trial.
Merchants’ reluctance to pay for POS terminals
has been a sticking point in rolling out near
field communication or NFC-enabled handsets
despite many pilots, initiatives and trials around
the world.
Apple has long been expected to join the
NFC fray too and their entry into the market
(backed by mountains of cash in the bank
operators can only dream of) could mean
service providers have missed the boat, and
that payments will become just another OTT
service they carry without gaining a share of
the revenue.
Spotting the opportunities
One attendee commented, “It still isn’t clear
to me that we as an industry have the DNA to
be repetitively innovative – SMS was a bit of an
engineering accident, prepay an accountancy
accident.” Be that as it may, through a
combination of massively enthusiastic user
feedback of the most powerful sort there
is – using the services concerned – operators
were quick to see they had potential andsupport them.
It has been suggested that there is a great
danger that telcos will also give away their
location-based advantages because they failed
to capitalize on them while they had little
competition.
A participant from one of the world’s largest
telecoms groups said that service providers
are much too focused on today’s fat margins
to be sufficiently concerned with future issues
and uncomfortable changes. It’s sobering to
look back 15 years and remember how smallthe mobile industry was then, while Apple was
struggling desperately to reinvent itself and
Google didn’t exist.
In another 15 years, things that are small
and emerging sectors now – such as cloud,
e-health and machine-to-machine (M2M)
communications – are likely to be on a scale
we can’t imagine now and one that dwarfs
what has gone before.
Catalysts for innovation
One means of trying things out quickly and
with little risk is through initiating a TM Forum
Catalyst project. The projects provide a rapid
prototyping environment where suppliers and
systems integrators work together for between
three and six months to create innovative
solutions for operational and systems
challenges defined by end users. They could be
network operators, cable companies, defense
agencies, enterprise IT departments or other
types of service provider.
These projects accelerate development and
show just how the use of the Forum’s best
practices and standards enable parties to work
together, get projects off the ground fast and
prove operational and business benefits.
They enable service providers to speed
up trials that can lead to the successful
deployment of solutions and help the
Forum add to and update its standards
and best practices to accommodate its
members’ needs.
The solutions created by the Catalyst
project teams are demonstrated live atTM Forum Management World events. For
more information, see http://www.tmforum.
org/CatalystProgram/786/home.html and
contact Nora Doherty, Catalyst Program
Manager if you would like to participate:
ndoherty@tmforum.org
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Ideas can come from anywhere
and small ideas can have very big results
There is an old joke that goes, “How many
psychologists does it take to change a light
bulb?” The answer is, “None, it has to want to
change itself.” The communications industry too
must accept the need to change and embrace
innovation to move ahead. We need to*:
Give people the power to make their own
decisions, rather than escalating everything
upward. This is too slow and too limiting.
Accept that creativity arises out of constraint
– tough times do not automatically mean
fewer options. It has long been recognized that
necessity is the mother of invention.
It doesn’t matter if you don’t know exactly
what you’re looking for, so long as you have the
wits to spot a potentially good idea when you
see it and have the courage to do something
about it.
Foster an environment that encourages and
enables innovation, even if it means setting
up an incubator or subsidiary away from the
potentially stifling influence of the parent
organization.
Ideas can come from anywhere, be receptive
to all sources.
Small ideas can have very big, unforeseen
results.
Don’t spend millions of dollars and months
planning huge, elaborate marketing campaignsuntil you know you’re on a winner, by trying
it out, internally where appropriate, and from
feedback from the outside world wherever
possible. It’s a great reality check, even if
the responses are not flattering or what you
expected.
Accept that failure is part of the learning
process, not a catastrophe, but fail quickly, learn
well and move on. Often you don’t need to kill
something, just tweak it based on feedback
from users.
General principles of innovation
Section 3
Listen to users, as often as you can and as
many as you can.
Industrial-strength engineering and five nines’
reliability is not always necessary in a world of
best effort and all-you-can-eat offers.
Really focus on what our customers want
– endless conversations about customer
experience often involve thinking in well-worn
channels (which created the problems in the
first place) rather than innovating.
Reliance on partnerships is inevitable, the
industry needs to see the over-the-top players
as partners rather than deadly enemies – after
all, they offer our customers services they
clearly want and are completely dependent
on our networks to do that. They too need to
evolve and offer a new generation of services,
and create more traffic to fill those networks.
Why are we apparently so reluctant to
assume the role of enabler?
To act on these recommendations (the list is
not nor intended to be exhaustive), standards
and best practices are key because without
them an organization spends too much time
reinventing what exists already and duplicating
effort, which is expensive and time-consuming.
Case studies show that standards are key
A critical element of innovation has to bestandards to provide operational flexibility
and speed, along with a platform from which
innovative services can be launched (and torn
down) quickly and easily. Business agility is
simply not possible if a service provider is
handicapped by proprietary systems and unique,
instead of repeatable and recyclable, processes.
The TM Forum Case Study Handbook (http://
www.tmforum.org/CaseStudies/2212/home.
html) shows how a standards-based approach
pays huge dividends.
*Many of these recommendations
owe much to Marissa Mayer’s Nine
Principles of Innovation. She is theVice President of Location and Local
Services at Google – see http://ecorner
stanford.edu/author/marissa_mayer
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By using TM Forum’s Frameworx suite of
standards, as well as our Revenue Assurance
Maturity Model and other activities, operators
big and small, in developed and emerging
markets, are reaping huge benefits – from
faster deployment to big contributions to the
bottom line.
The case studies show how China Unicom
(with around half a billion subscribers) is
generating an additional billion dollars annually
in new revenues and cost savings, through
deploying Frameworx. At the other end of the
scale, we profile how Mobitel, Slovenia’s largest
operator (the country’s population is just over 2
million) was able to spend:
40 percent less on professional services;
80 percent less through the reuse of artifacts;
and
40 percent less on total cost of ownership.
At the same time, it cut its delivery cycle by
45 percent for ongoing maintenance and new
releases of processes.
A new innovation initiative for members
TM Forum has established a Think Tank to
provide greater leadership on cutting-edge
issues to its members and the industry at large.
The Think Tank leverages the ideas of TM
Forum’s senior staff, members and respectedexperts.
“By using TM Forum’s Frameworx suite of standards,
as well as our Revenue Assurance Maturity Model and
other activities, operators are reaping huge benefits.”
INNOVATION:THE TRILLION-DOLLAR QUESTION
It will produce strategic assessments and
position papers, guidance for TM Forum
programs and knowledge assets for CxO level
executives.
The Think Tank is designed to provide
guidance as rapidly as possible. It will examine
an issue, assess its industry relevance, explore
what opportunities (if any) exist for TM Forum
and develop a clear position and strategy in
roughly a four-week cycle.
Additional activities, such as white papers and
executive education briefs, will then follow, as
appropriate.
For more information about the Forum’s Think
Tank please contact Jim Warner on
jwarner@tmforum.org.
14 www.tmforum.orgQUICK INSIGHTS
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ENABLING INNOVATION
The game is changing for communications service
providers. Cutting costs is merely a ticket to play,
not to grow. The key to growth lies with innovation –
underpinned by business agility, smart partnerships
and inspired creativity.
As the global industry association focused on
simplifying the complexity of running a service
provider’s business, TM Forum brings together a
community of more than 50,000 professionals on
the cutting edge of innovation. As a unifying force for
the industry, it’s time for you to join more than 750
companies across 195 countries collaborating to
simplify service innovation.
Visit www.tmforum.org to learn more about
TM Forum membership and how we help you
enable innovation.
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www.tmforum.org
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