Results tagged “telecoms”

I wrote a little brain-dump on decommodification this morning and have just now come across tom at interesting (different tom) a video from Russell Davies Interesting 2007 conference.

Tom talks about pipes (or tubes) and starts off his presentation with the example of the tobacco infrastructure, the incredible world of resources and infrastructure required for you to smoke a cigarette...

Which kinda ties-in with the aforementioned telecoms operator's pipes and their relationship to value co-creation...

No conclusions as of yet, but the video is nice, so go watch it:-)

What's that Dug? A new-year's prediction in September? Shurly shome mistake... Well, this one just popped into my brain so I thought I'd put it down on paper. I think 2008 will be the year of decommodification. The word exists already and has a few definitions. I'd like to propose a new one.

Decommodification The process by which value is re-infused into what those in the know in the telecoms industry call "pipes" as in "Vodafone is just a leaser of pipes".

The executives you'll hear using this phrase will be using it in the context of trying to find ways for the business to add value. If pipes are 'just' a commodity and the money is in what travels through those pipes then the telecoms operation needs to invest in building tools and services it can sell (like webmail applications or photo-sharing apps).

I think 2008 will see telco operators realise that the kids are creating the apps they need themselves, but what Ben Trott, Chris Messina, Katerina Fake, Rasmus Lerdorf or even today's darling Mark Zuckerberg can't do is provide ubiquitous, pervasive, reliable, cheap and universal connectivity to planet earth.

I know it's a lot less glamourous than making groovy stuff but there is one seriously big place in heaven for the operator who becomes the world's Good Connectivity Partner.

Well, that's what I was thinking anyway...

(Photo: Clementine Falby by David Hockney)

So I've just finished a user experience consultancy gig with a major mobile network operator based in France. It's an interesting project which I'll be picking up again in the new year. I've been working alongside product owners (ie individuals who are assigned with owning the business of a part of a website or service) and have been factoring their business objectives into the objectives versus needs process. Having just spent ten months working through the objectives of a UK network operator it was interesting to see the different approaches to the business. I can't really go into any details, but one of the key differences is that the French team have managed to build a business treating their products as containing inherent value. For example, the French customers are apparently happy to pay extra to add services to their account which the English would have added to the service for free in the interest of building a better experience, getting closer to the consumer and starting to build the bonds of trust that are a key component of the d.a.r.t approach.

I was reminded of all this when I rediscovered the fd's Flickr toys page. The tools (and many, many, other wonderful ones elsewhere) are built thanks to the public Flickr api. The tools let users discover value in their photographs beyond what the camera or the storage/sharing/hosting service can offer. The fd page is such a great example of what happens when openness and collaboration build on an already great service.

Note to mobile network operators everywhere: I get so much value out of my interaction with Flickr I would gladly pay triple what I pay today for my account.