The Times they are a Changing (Except for Time to Market)
Time to market is more important than ever from the perspective of service providers, but that hasn’t led to much visible improvement on the ground.
When it comes to the average time to market for introducing new products, not much has improved between 2008 and 2011. In fact, the number of service providers able to bring a product to market within six months has actually fallen; in 2008, 67% of service providers said it took six months or less to bring a new product to market, compared with 65% in 2011.
So while service providers strongly believe that quickly introducing new services has a positive impact on customer churn/loyalty, revenue generation, customer experience and brand reputation, most of the service providers we interviewed haven’t been able to meet their target.
The 2011 survey shows that as many as one in three service providers failed to achieve their target of delivering new services within six months over the last three years. The majority of service providers would like to be able to introduce new services in less than three months, but for most of them it takes between three to six months.
Indeed, there is a significant gap between the achieved time to market and what service providers actually aspire to achieve. This is especially true in Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA), where twice as many companies (44%) have less than three months as their target time to market compared to those who actually achieve it (21%).
But while the average time to market hasn’t changed, 50% of service providers have seen their costs of providing new services increase by 15%. This is directly linked to the complexity of service providers’ current systems.
It simply takes service providers too long to change the processes and systems for new projects, (and any change also significantly impacts existing products as well). Blame the numerous legacy systems and the hard-coded processes that surround them from past changes.
The complexity of the technology is also a time-to-market challenge. Even IP technology (which simplifies things in some respects) still includes many parameters that must be deployed and set-up when introducing a new product or service. And on top of this there’s the issue of B/OSS integration, which service providers have been facing for many years and is now more crucial than ever.
Keep watching this space for my next post, which will provide a solution to these serious problems.
Please note: this is part two of a five-part series:
[...] Part two [...]