Welcome to this IBM Rational podcast, Accelerating the Delivery of Mobile Services. I'm Kimberly

Transcription

1 [ MUSIC ] Welcome to this IBM Rational podcast, Accelerating the Delivery of Mobile Services. I'm Kimberly Gist with IBM. Communication service providers -- or, CSPs --are under pressure to deliver compelling services to their customers in order to reduce churn and at the same time raise the average revenue per user. However, the process from when a service is first conceived until it is actually deployed can be very cumbersome and inhibit a CSP's success. Today's podcast will cover new and innovative ways for CSPs to accelerate the delivery of high generating mobile services. Scott Niemann, telecommunications marketing manager for IBM Rational, joins us for some insight on innovative ways for CSPs to accelerate mobile services delivery. Welcome, Scott. Hi. Good to be here. Great to have you. So why don't we just jump into the first question? What would you say are some of the major challenges service providers are facing today in delivering mobile services? Well, the biggest problem that they're seeing -- and this has to do with the service provider product -1-

2 manager -- are what are the right services that they should be delivering? Service providers are getting a lot of ideas internally amongst the company as well as certainly from customers with social media sites and forums, and what they have to do is take all these ideas and determine what is the right thing that they should go to market with. And once they start creating a portfolio, how do they know that they have the optimal portfolio out there for their customers? They always have to continually reassess their portfolio against the current business objectives of the company, because in a very competitive market, such as telecommunications market, business objectives of service providers may change yearly or even less than that. So there always has to be a continual reassessment of that portfolio to make sure that that's matching the objectives of the company. So, and once the decision is made what they should go to market with, how do they know when they build something it's actually meeting the requirements of those customers? So this whole idea of having some type of end-to-end traceability to show that what they've actually produced is meeting what the customers have been asking for is very, -2-

3 very important. But it's not only just deciding what to do and building it, it's also the back end systems that have to support it. As you know, service providers have many different customers, and they have, for example, business support systems that have to do with billing and customer relationship management. A new service may have impact on those business support applications and operating support applications that need to be upgraded. So the whole back end IT infrastructure may need some updating in order to support the new service or the new service will not be successful. So really this notion of integrating IT and the network side of the service provider business is very critical to ensure [process] of new mobile services when they're realized. Wow, a great list of unique and relative challenges, Scott. So our next question would be, what is the best way for a service provider to decide what services to deliver to their customers in order to meet their needs of increasing revenues and keeping their customers happy? That's a good question. So it goes back to this idea of what we refer to as idea management. They're -3-

4 getting lots of requests internally within the company and especially externally with the customers, and they have to decide, okay, what is going to be best for us to go to market with? So as these ideas are coming in, they're being analyzed by business analysts, subject matter experts, and they have certain complexity and expected revenue numbers attached to them. And traditionally how it's done in a product management point of view is more of a spreadsheet type of form. There's a lot of data that back up these ideas and they have to make sure that these ideas are supporting the business objectives of the company. Well, it's very hard to take a look at just data and start comparing it and number crunching it. Typically it would be great to have a visual way to see how these ideas compare with one another. For example, IBM Rational has a facility to do this through Rational Focal Point that can take in ideas and do a visual comparison and take note of what is most important to the service provider. So, for example, they can [review] the complexity, return on investment, those types of things, what is most important for the service provider and get a graphical comparison of those ideas to help them make better decisions. So depending on what the idea is, they get relative score for -4-

5 that idea and it gives them a good idea of how that idea is going to impact the business in the future. And we refer to this as a method of delivering smarter services by using market-driven information, and that market-driven information is coming in through customers, through forums, social media outlets such as [spigot] that can directly input stuff within the Rational Focal Point environment to give you a graphical view of what you should do as a next step as a service provider on determining what are the right services. So definitely IBM management is key. Our next question. Once a service provider decides what services to go to market with, how can they deliver them quickly to gain a competitive edge? Okay. Well, there's really two different areas that they can go about doing. One is...and we see this within service providers today, most are doing Agile methods. And really moving to an Agile way of developing by breaking down the different silos between the development organizations, not just within the development, but within marketing, within development, within the testing organizations, by using really a collaborative form of Agile development. -5-

6 For example, Rational has a way to do this through a collaborative lifecycle management solution that really promotes this end-to-end traceability I mentioned earlier. So as these ideas are conceived -- and we're using Focal Point to help us pick out what are the best ideas to go to market with -- we can start to develop these. We can attach requirements to them, and we can link those requirements to different development artifacts, to different tests and test cases. So at the end of the day when they actually produce a product, they can have a direct mapping and say, okay, this is achieving this customer requirement. So there's always this end-to-end traceability so we know exactly what we're going to market with and if or if not it's satisfying the customer requirements. But not only that, there's this other aspect I mentioned before is that when we actually decide what mobile service we're going to build and deliver to our customers, there has to be this back end we have to worry about. So in the service provider world, there is an industry standard framework by the [comanagement forum] called frameworks. And frameworks basically defines a blueprint for how a service provider should run the business. -6-

7 And what's real key about frameworks is that it really allows us to take a look at the overall system and how to integrate the network in the IT parts of the business and make sure that they're always satisfying business objectives. So it's in conjunction with this framework's architecture and collaborative lifecycle management which really enables us to deliver the right services at the right time to the market. Great. Well, one final question for today. What does the service provider need to do once it launches a new service to the market to ensure ongoing success? Good question. So the whole concept of portfolio management is that it's a continual activity. You can't just go out, market with certain set of services and be satisfied with that. It's always because there's business objectives that are changing within the company, and perhaps what we have out there is not supporting your objectives; or, what we conceived first to go to the market with isn't getting the expected ROI that we felt. And as you know, in this type of market -- a very hyper competitive market -- we're always getting new ideas. So we have to take the new ideas and assess them with what we -7-

8 already have within the portfolio. So this goes back to this whole idea management process that is used, for example, in solution like Rational Focal Point to compare new ideas, to compare what's in the portfolio now and see how the performance...and this really gives us a good idea, as a service provider of what we should possibly be sunsetting, because it's not doing what we thought it would do; or, it allows us to create an opportunity for new services. For service providers to be competitive, the biggest thing for them is to provide new service. They just put a lot of investment in upgrading their networks with new 4G LTE systems, and that really brings forth a new set of services that they could deliver. So what they have to do is take a look at the existing portfolio and see if it really matches the new network. Now, you can compare that with new ideas that are coming in that could end up being much more profitable for CSPs in the future. Great. New services are always wonderful for those using those services. Thank you so much, Scott. A great overview and really insightful key points for our listeners to consider. We appreciate your time and -8-

9 invaluable expertise on this subject. You're welcome. That was Scott Niemann, Telecommunications Marketing Manager for IBM Rational, providing valuable insight into today's topic, accelerating the delivery of mobile services. To hear this specific podcast or browse additional topics, check out our Rational Talks to You podcast page at This has been an IBM podcast. I'm your moderator Kimberly Gist. Thank you for listening, and we hope that you will choose to tune in as Rational Talks to You. [ MUSIC ] [END OF SEGMENT] -9-