An Executive’s Tale

Network can’t hide behind techno-babble anymore

By Tom Wiencko

This is a tale of a conversation that never actually happened. The facts, circumstances and problems, however, will be familiar to every service provider. As telcos struggle to transform themselves, executives are working to change habits and structures that have been set for years. They face resistance and in many cases battle the adage – “when you can’t dazzle ‘em with brilliance, baffle ‘em with B.S.” Such is the way of those who would resist change in order to protect fiefdoms that may have no place in the new generation being built today.

I walked into the CEO's office after a 20 minute wait. The man never seems to get people out of his office on time. This time, the worried look on his face spoke volumes. This was not going to be a pleasant conversation for him.

"Thanks for coming on such short notice, Tom, ” he said. “ I always know I can count on you in a crunch. And sorry I had to keep you waiting. More of the same as usual - dealing with problems I thought I had already solved."

"No problem Dave," I replied as I sat down at the small table at one end of his office. "You sounded worried on the phone and you look worried right now. What's going on?"

"Before I tell you my problem let me give you some background. I think you already know most of this from the various projects you ' ve done for us lately, but I want you to hear it from my perspective. After I fill you in on this, I want you to help me think it through so I can develop some action plans.

"You know as well as anyone the mess I inherited after all of the mergers and acquisitions. The business was a hodge-podge of systems and people and management philosophies, and it was impossible to get much done as a unified company. Over the past several years we ' ve gotten our arms around a lot of that. We reorganized customer service, marketing, and sales and have seen some real improvements in those areas. We now have one consistent way of selling our products and services, one consistent brand image, and a consistent experience in customer support. We have even begun to win awards in some of these areas.

"But success still eludes us in our network organization. Don't get me wrong, the network is up and running - we can process calls just fine, but we ' re not making any progress in making it better. We ' re spending billions of dollars on the network every year and we still have complaints about poor service, dropped calls, missing voice mail, and lots of other problems. Every time I ask our network vice presidents about what ' s going on and how we can improve, I get incomprehensible technical gibberish that neither tells me what we need to do differently nor shows what I ' m getting for the billions I ' m spending. It ' s very frustrating talking to those people. They don ' t talk about things I can relate to like ARPU and churn, but they talk plenty about technical stuff that frankly only seems to mean something to them."

"I know what you mean," I agreed. "Listening to them makes my head hurt sometimes, and I actually understand what they ' re talking about."

The CEO continued. "I realized a year ago that I could not let network continue on its own path. I put specific network goals at the top of our list of enterprise goals for the year, and I told them to get busy. They put one of their best regional VPs in charge - somebody who ' s not too well liked at the home office but seems to get a lot of success in his region. They ' re famous for generating a lot of paperwork that nobody else seems to think we need, but they get the job done. They have the best performance results in the company."

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