Many of Ovum’s competitors (e.g. Forrester, Gartner, IDC, Yankee) have started official blog networks (Ovum doesn’t have one, but several individual analysts have personal blogs, like this one). Many of both our analysts and our competitors’ analysts are on Twitter (here’s SageCircle’s list) and Facebook. But in all these we’re really feeling our way through the process of creating new ways for clients to interact with us, and have had little direct input from clients on how they’d like to interact.
I’m curious as to whether our clients find any of these methods of interacting with clients useful, and if so, which Ovum should adopt and how. Are any of the other analyst blog networks out there particularly good (or bad) examples of how this should be done? And if we should start blogging through official channels, what should the content of the blog posts be? What should the emphasis be on? If Twitter, what would be useful to see there?
By definition this is a personal blog, and so I’m asking this question as an individual analyst and not as an official survey of Ovum’s clients. But I’m a big believer that we need to be doing more in this space, and I’d love to have some real feedback from clients to either reinforce that view or amend it.
If you’d prefer to comment privately, please send me an email (janovum [at] gmail [dot] com).
Since commenters are shy on this blog, please use the poll instead / as well:
Loading ...
In my post defining the Social Telco I made brief reference to the help telcos need with innovation, but I think it’s worth a post in its own right. This is a topic I addressed in an Ovum comment a while back too – that comment was picked up in a couple of places which are available outside Ovum’s gated community here and here. The focus of that piece was an Innovation Day AT&T held, which was designed to showcase some of the things coming out of the AT&T Labs. My main point was that telcos were lousy at innovation and that substantial R&D investments were probably no longer a worthwhile exercise with few exceptions. That’s essentially the point I’d like to expand on here.
Telcos do a terrible job at innovation
Telcos are abysmal at creating new services that customers actually want. Part of the problem is that they have historically been very engineering-led, rather than marketing-led, organizations. Engineers ordered parts for the network, which offered certain features. The only decision to be made was which of these features to switch on. Telcos have been very bad at really understanding customers’ needs and creating services to meet those needs. In the old voice world, that wasn’t a big deal, since there were few competitors and they were largely relying on the same infrastructure from the same suppliers. But VoIP changed all that, and provided a view of things to come: when truly innovative players enter markets where telcos dominate, they create real disruption.
There are significant barriers to change
All the major shifts in communication in the last 20 years have come through players other than telcos – the world wide web and email were created by DARPA, IM was pioneered by Internet players such as AOL, Microsoft and Yahoo!, social networks created the next big wave of communication and so on. Telcos are nowhere to be found in that list. The major barriers are:
- telcos are still engineering driven in many ways and buy their apps from traditional players
- they have large installed bases and have defending those bases as a major strategic priority – anything that threatens to cannibalize them is therefore suspect
- the development process for new services has been so long and expensive that they can afford to place only very few big bets, making them risk averse and preventing them from straying far from their traditional services
- all their business models are based on funding new investments through new revenue streams, and mitigate the opportunity for adding new functionality that isn’t paid for directly. They are also not expert in advertising-funded business models.
All of this means that telcos are still bad at innovation and unlikely to get any better. The shift to software-based rather than hardware-based services, including the implementation of IMS, should assist a little in making services quicker and cheaper to roll out, and therefore allow for more experimentation and risk-taking. But a large part of the barrier is still cultural – telcos’ size, scale and history all prevent them from being as innovative or as fast-moving as web players.
The solution: outsource innovation
The logical solution is therefore to outsource R&D to some extent to third parties. That means Web 2.0 players but it also means the armies of developers – both professional and amateur – who love nothing better than to leverage APIs and/or SDKs from existing players to create new and interesting mashups and combinations of functionality to create new services. This means telcos have to make those interfaces available too, in a way that’s attractive for developers. The iPhone is the best possible example of the ideal way to motivate developers: make the end result exciting. The iPhone has tiny market share compared with most of the other mobile operating systems out there, but it captures massive developer mind share because the possibilities are so vast and because of the cool factor. Telcos need to find ways to expose their network functionality which will mimic the success of the iPhone SDK among the developer community.
All carriers need to adopt this model – some with more control than others
Telcos and their equipment suppliers are currently responsible for 90%+ of the innovation which happens in telco services, and that’s simply not going to provide the kind of innovation that’s needed today. However, with an army of developers using APIs and SDKs to create new services, telcos can tap into a much larger base of innovation, and can either allow a thousand flowers to bloom by simply taking a hands-off approach or taking a more hands-on approach and actively selecting and qualifying the most promising applications for a more carrier-endorsed release to customers. The latter approach allows more control and therefore quality assurance, but it also means the telco is once again second-guessing customers’ preferences rather than simply allowing the market to work. Each carrier will have to make its own decisions about that tradeoff. But all carriers should be adopting an open approach to innovation and leveraging all the talent available in creating the next generation of services.
