Management World 2009: Insightful Keynotes and Practical Summits

No matter where you are in the world, the economic recession that hit us like a ton of bricks in 2008 is continuing to impact just about every industry and market. And even a stalwart area like communications is feeling the effects of the global financial situation.

Surviving these tough times is forefront on the minds of operators everywhere, which is why TM Forum’s flagship event – Management World 2009 – which is being held May 4-8 in Nice, France, is the place to be to learn about strategies and new business models to keep our industry not only afloat, but thriving in an otherwise bleak economy.

Our main focus is to recognize that the challenges the industry faced 12 months ago are still there, and there’s no point pretending they’ve somehow vanished. But on the other side of the coin, the opportunities of 12 months ago are still there, too. The difference is we’re finding ourselves in a very different market where every decision you make will directly impact your bottom line for better or worse.

For a while now, I and my colleagues at TM Forum have been talking about the practicality of transformation in the communications industry. For several years, transformation has been used as the industry catch-phrase to say we’re moving from a being a stodgy old provider of voice and a few data services to becoming a next-generation provider that delivers voice and data but also a whole load of other services that the industry wants, and packages them all together in a way that makes them attractive for customers.

If you boil it down, that’s the essential definition of transformation. But the term has been hijacked by some of the major telco projects that have been implemented in the recent past. But when you get down to it, the practicalities of transformation are anything you are doing to automate your operations, create a new service and delivery environment and reduce your costs.

Some of these projects are of a monumental scope and scale, while others are smaller and more humble but no less important.

Survival of the Fittest

To really delve into transformation and opportunities for service providers, we’ve lined up a stellar group of keynote speakers at Management World, who will present the morning of Wednesday, May 6.

We’ll kick things off with a high-level picture of the growth opportunities for the telecom industry. We have Sanjiv Ahuja, Chairman of Augere and former CEO of Orange Group and Rory Sutherland, Vice Chairman of Ogilvy Group talking about understanding what customers want and what today’s digital economy actually needs.

The next part of the keynote session will focus on operational challenges in telecom transformation. In this session, the speakers will discuss how to keep your operations running even while implementing a business-wide transformation project. I like to compare this to keeping a train running while laying down tracks in front of you while you are in motion. That is actually what operations people have to face in any transformation program. They can’t shut down their business, do the transformation, and then open back up for business.

So to talk about this aspect, we have Kevin Peters, Executive Vice President at AT&T, who will give us his view on how we should approach operational transformation and how major companies can tackle this seemingly impossible challenge of laying tracks in front of a speeding train.
 
Also participating in this panel will be Matt Desch, Chairman and CEO of Iridium and Albert Hitchcock, CIO of Vodafone Group Services. Together, this group of speakers has a deep understanding of the operational challenges of major telecom transformation.

We’ll also feature another set of presentations focusing on the services aspect of telecom transformation. So if you take the analogy of laying down track in front of a speeding train, the other aspect of this is where is the train going? In other words, what are you hoping to achieve as a result of your transformation?

So we’ve got Werner Vogels, CTO of Amazon, Dr. Hossein Eslambolchi, Chairman and CEO of 2020 Venture Partners, Simon Wright, CEO of Virgin Entertainment and Matt Bross, CEO of BT Innovate who will talk about what services to deliver and how to get a return on the major investment involved in transformation. After all, you don’t transform for the sake of transformation; you transform in order to get a return.

Overall, our keynote sessions will be extremely strong. But you’ll notice that rather than focusing on “blue sky” and extremely visionary topics, we’re keeping things very real. Since our Management World event in Orlando last November, we’ve had a very sobering few months, and what we’re trying to do is get down to brass tacks on how you  keep your business running while transforming and how you monetize all of this so you get real money real fast.

New Priorities, New Profits, New Business Models

That’s not to say we won’t be looking out into the future at all during Management World. Quite the opposite, while a lot of our discussions will be about fighting today’s battles, we’ll also be looking over the next hill and what’s to come. I would actually argue that the battle has brought us halfway or three-quarters of the way up the hill already.

The Digital Media Value Chain Summit will feature speakers from the likes of Google, MySpace, Thomson Reuters and companies that have become more and more relevant to us over the past few years as the value chain extends in all directions. Just a couple of years ago, it would have been mind-blowing to think of Google or MySpace as TM Forum partners; now everybody gets it.

While this particular summit might be looking a bit further down the horizon, our other important summits will bring us back to Earth and help us address today’s issues and challenges.

The Business Transformation Summit will feature speakers from Level 3 Communications, Cable & Wireless and more. These are very senior people talking about the practicalities of business transformation. Just a few years ago, TM Forum would have led on the technical side and put business on the back end. But really what we’re finding now is that the technology challenges are driven by business challenges. In other words, you adopt technology to solve a business problem; you don’t adopt technology and then try to find out what it can do.

We also have our Customer Experience Summit, which covers an area that is really self-evident these days. In any of the services industries – and telecom is no different – customer experience is not just about how quickly you can fix customer problems or answer a call center call. It’s really about the ability to bring it to the next level by personalizing everything down to the customer level.

This idea of mass customization says everything is essentially a market of one. From a customer perspective, that one individual out there is your only customer. But the challenge, of course, is how you personalize service to such a granular level without incurring huge costs. We’ll feature speakers from Telecom Italia, Swisscom and more to address these issues.

We’ll also feature a Charging & Revenue Management Summit that will delve into revenue assurance, benchmarking, combating fraud, real-time charging and billing, online charging and a host of other topics that our industry is continually dealing with. This particular summit will be more about best practices than anything else. Alongside top speakers from Etisalat UAE, MTN Group and Deutsche Telekom, we’ll also have the Vice President of IT from Saudi Telecom, which is one of the most forward-looking telcos in the world and the dominant player in the Middle East today.

And the Technology Transformation Summit will take a look at how technology is playing an important role in transforming the entire value chain and will feature how the practical lessons learned from existing implementations are influencing new technology and new architectures within the industry today. This track will feature speakers from Deutsche Telekom, BT Wholesale, Telstra, Cabovisao and Telus.

We have a lot of very serious players coming to Nice to talk about serious issues, but it won’t be all hard work I assure you. As usual, we’ll be hosting a number of business networking opportunities to give attendees ample time to enjoy the absolutely stunning French Riviera.

We’ll host our annual business networking party, where attendees can meet and do business with executives from across the value chain. We’ll also have our Forumville Technology Innovation Zone, which brings the best of TM Forum in one area, including the Catalyst Technology Showcase, Content Encounter demonstrations, the Prosspero Pavilion and Knowledge Zone.

We’ll also feature over 20 hours of Expo floor opportunities over three days where you can meet with dozens of exhibitors that will be showcasing their latest technology, products and services.

 All of this and much more, including training and the Excellence Awards await you at our global event for the information, communications and entertainment industries.