The quest for the Digital Telco

1. Sneak Book Preview : Telco Global Connect Vol 4
https://www.amazon.com/Telco-Global-Connect-Vol-Digital/dp/1533087857
This book unpacks the man challenges and proposes the main building blocks of a Digital Telco.
In brief Digital Telcos manage to reconfigure themselves to deliver high quality, integrated
product offerings across a number of more established digital service areas, including Machine-
to-Machine, Cloud Computing, eHealth, Financial Services, Advertising and Information Security.
The material exploring the Digital Mantra is organised into various chapters or Agendas. For
example in the Technology Agenda the book explores how Digital Telcos deploy a new breed of IT-
centric services that involve the use of data, analytics and digital content. And how Digital telcos
themselves into diversified service providers by harvesting business value from existing
networks, IT and information assets while hunting for new opportunities using digital services.
In the Agility agenda the Book investigates how leading Telcos use the E Tom framework and
Lean Thinking to streamline operations and eliminate waste. Using enterprise architecture
blueprints, Telcos are able to define strategies and develop target architectures to transform its
business and operational support systems (BSS/OSS). The blueprints can identify gaps in the
architecture and set up initiatives to address them in the application architecture, for purposes
beyond the BSS/OSS transformation, to gain new customer-supporting functionality.
The Business Agenda chapter evaluates for example at how Social network tools help staff find
the right individual or group of people.Tagging and rating provide a straightforward way to find
content and make judgments about what to look at. Blogs and wikis are natural collaboration and
communication platforms. Giving employees the freedom to speak their mind and voice ideas is
required for there to be a harnessing of collective intelligence. Telcos will need to rethink the way
they innovate to become much more agile and open to working with third parties.
The Leadership Agenda tackles the real challenges of going Digital because legacy systems
present technical roadblocks when attempting to change, modify or expand offerings. Cultural
barriers prevent operators from moving fast enough. This constraint both dramatically increases
the time it takes to launch or modify services and also limits what operators can create and
deliver. A different kind of Leadership style is required to surmount the hurdles. Transformation is
hard, but executives who don’t make the effort are dooming their companies to irrelevance at
best and failure at worst.
Going Digital means simplifying , retooling the network for Virtualisation , Cloud , Big Data ,
Analytics , reconfiguring the Organisational structure , consolidating revamping the IT Core ,
creating a new business model based on thorough understanding of the digital consumer….YES
EVERYTHING AND MORE. In the final analysis Digital Telcos aim to provide the digital products
and services which will help to improve the lives of our customers by leveraging the power of
technology.
Overall the Book is written like a How To Manual for serious digitally inclined Telco execs, It
examines all the pertinent issues of going Digital through a technology , financial and commercial
prism. It will appeal to engineers as well as marketers and finance people in the Telco
industry...and yes…it can be on your office bookshelf as a Reference manual or easy reading like
a bed time story book.
“ We become what we behold, we shape our tools and our tools shape us "
Marshall McLuhan