Page 279 - Performance Leadership

268 • Part IV Implementing the Performance Leadership Framework

has emerged, through fixed/mobile convergence, broadband, and
“local loops.” Competition is fierce, from direct competitors but also
from unexpected angles, such as financial services firms, i.e., banks,
who want to have control over business-critical infrastructure for
mobile banking. Another source of competition comes from providers
without an infrastructure, who just buy minutes in bulk from estab-
lished telecoms and sell them at a low price to end consumers; or from
cable TV providers and even electricity providers, who also have an
infrastructure reaching many households, and through modern tech-
nology, offer telecommunication services using their infrastructures.
The way for telecoms to survive and to maintain margins is to offer
an ever-expanding range of subscription types, ranging from prepaid
offers, to a multitude of “value packs,” including text messaging, data
access (Internet), special rates for international calling, and discounts
on special phone numbers, all based on different consumer behaviors
and life styles. Although it would be in the best interest of consumers
for all these subscription types to be comparable, telecoms deliberately
differ enough from the competition to make sure consumers cannot
choose a provider purely on price. In other words, the margins of tele-
coms partly exist due to the lack of transparency for their customers.
Next to expanding the capabilities of the telecom infrastructures,
telecoms also aggressively enter other businesses, to compete with the
firms that enter the telecom market. Almost every telecom has invested
in being an Internet provider as well. And in the corporate world, tele-
coms increasingly compete with systems integrators by offering inte-
grated information and communication technology (ICT) services.
One of the most interesting areas of expansion is in product and serv-
ice integration, offering cable TV access as fixed-price packages to cus-
tomers—“triple play”: Internet, (Internet) telephone, and TV.
At the same time, within the various products and services, there is
an extreme differentiation with many different types of subscriptions
and marketing campaigns. In this hypercompetitive environment, exe-
cution must be flawless. In order to manage this complexity and speed
of business, telecom organizations need to focus on their internal align-
ment, even before aligning with their external stakeholders in their per-
formance network. Figure 15.1 shows how the internal performance
network of a telecom company that offers triple play is organized into