In today’s on-demand, always available world, IT needs to evolve to support an active customer-facing service provider. Carriers are under a lot of stress these days. Deregulation and stiff competition has meant little differentiation among service providers as they struggle to buy into the mindshare of consumers that see instant connectivity as the way to stay socially connected, and enterprises that see a business opportunity with that need.
The McKinsey report “B2B 2015: The future role of telcos in ICT markets” suggests that telecom growth will be data-driven, and that the convergence of IT and traditional telecom markets will cause telco B2B offerings to grow at attractive rates in the coming years.
According to McKinsey, global B2B telecommunications are set to grow through 2015 at a CAGR of 2.5% while growth of B2B IT services is pencilled in at 4.7%. These rates are faster than the 2% forecast for B2C telecommunications.
But to make it all happen, service providers must revisit how they use information technology to drive their business.
The definition of IT in the past was the internal functions to make the company work like billing systems, operation systems to provision and assure services, and the network and desktop infrastructure for employees. Today, however, IT for a service provider has evolved into a customer-facing role and is seen as a means for service providers to differentiate from others.
Thus, yet another level of complexity has been added to a CIO’s already challenging role. Not only does the CIO have to support the existing set of applications and infrastructure with a generally decreasing budget, the role now includes an expectation to expose some of that application functionality to end users to enable them to self-provision, self-order and monitor the services they receive.
As businesses try to address these challenges, I suggest CIOs to work on the organization. Specifically, break down traditional functional roles in the IT organization and in the product organizations.