Management World Nice 09 - what I remember

By the heat of these summer days, anybody can see this post is quite late in respect to the subject. All significant activities that happened there are even virtually available if you have the chance to be a TM Forum member. So why bother?



First of all, if there was something really outstanding or controversial, I may have been incited to write about it. This means that, for what I know about the event, everything was as usual, maybe a little bit less crowded spaces.



Second comes the test of time - what do I remember after almost a couple of months? This must be what the event impressed into my memory, whether I wanted it or not. By writing about it now, I feel more objective: no pressure to report immediately as any media representative would do to get the first readers attention, no feelings of excitement and explosive new ideas and hopes after a good keynote or panel, just memory traces recounted.



TM Forum treats media well - relevant telecom analysts and freelance writers were presente and active.

"Write about the Forum and this event" asked Martin Creaner, TM Forum's CTO, it his welcome speech for the media. I just looked at Analysys Mason's Commentary on events webpage and haven't seen anything yet on this one. Maybe somebody will read my blog, then ...



The keynotes featured an interesting blend of speakers, predominantly telecom (BT, Vodafone, Orange, AT&T) but with substantial Internet infusion (Yahoo, Amazon) and a little bit of spice from the Ogivly Group. It was obvious that telecoms do not connect with their customers at the same level and to the same degree as the Internet companies do. Yahoo's "who, where, when, doing what" -real time consumer connection, Amazon's business model where "choice and low prices" drive customer experience, increase traffic to sellers and lower costs which ultimately is passed as a benefit to consumer contrasted by far with AT&T's "operations guy" who oversees costs reductions in operational environments without any indication that this can be translated into "choice and lower prices" for the subscriber, not even clear metrics for the degree of improvement in service to subscriber. And now I realize that Customer Experience is something that telecoms and TM Forum talk about a lot, lately, but I haven't heard it strong and loud from any of the Internet players. Maybe they made it seem very easy to achieve or maybe it has something to do with the value chain each Service Provider plays in: Telcos - voice so call centers, Internet players - web so online feedback and support. Two worlds apart even when they are brough on the same stage!

The Telco 2.0 initiative took the opportunity to organize a new Executive Brainstorm event in parallel which increased the value of traveling for those executives and decreased their stress on the stage as they could repeat the main ideas to the two audiences : TM Forum and Telco 2.0.
I guess most of us left these "on stage" representations asking why smart people can not get their feet on the ground and those people who have their feet on the ground ... ups ...

The vendors exhibition grounds, a little bit less crowded, was like crying "sorry, not much innovation this year"! On the main floor, from CA's "half car - half airplane: we can help you find out what it is" (who could come up with something like this?) to Accanto's "say it in one breath: Customer and Service Assurance" to feel the "experience" (of the Customer, of course) , a lot of less imaginative marketing messages and many same old products from established brands.
A nice surprise, Huawei, showing up and clear a Service Delivery Platform banner, pointing in the direction of how the many OSS and BSS-es will finally be brought together and new services deployed in operations environments, there where it is not clear yet how software can provide a service.

More advanced ideas in a couple of catalyst projects, one about margin analysis - sponsored by Swisscom and executed by Connectiva addressing segmentation at a finer detail and allowing what-if scenarios to maximize margins on bundles of services, the other about service lifecycle management - sponsored by Qwest and executed by Network Cadence and Comptel (the Axiom PSA "legacy" for those who remember that bright catalyst a coupel of years ago) and looking at a service catalog solution that can combine data and processes around service lifecycle to support any type of business model and minimize cost of service delivery per customer.

Should I dare to say that if there were some glipses of innovation they sparkled from very small companies and many of them were beyond what current TM Forum solution frameworks (NGOSS) based on eTOM, SID and management applications offer? SquareHoop with a framework to rapidly create those custom applications for product management, Connectiva with a data model and business intelligence in support of targeting customers for maximum profit, ConceptWave with a cross breed between intelligently supporting fulfillment by fixing broken orders and intelligently presenting product offerings to the customer to match their profiles, CIQUAL challenging the network focused approach of measuring what matters for a customer of a mobile broadband service or Openet adding policy management to its offering - well yes, you have the data :-) I do not remember where is policy management in eTOM and SID, maybe they are ...

I would not do justice to Wipro if I did not remember their comprehensive service offering, their project lifecycle methodology and marketing based on benchmarking against competition.

But this is pretty much what remains in my memory about this event. Looking forward to the next one!