What’s on at Management World 2010: Day 1 Highlights

TM Forum’s Management World 2010 has kicked off, and luckily, we made it to Nice without much delay from the ash cloud.  After walking into the Acropolis Convention Center, it certainly became clear that cloud is the hottest topic on the conference agenda.

The keynote session also called out transformation and the customer experience as two key issues that would be largely discussed this week. Noted speaker, Liu Aili, executive vice president and board director at China Mobile, touched upon the former with a discussion about the operator’s move to an all IP network.  The world’s largest operator with 540 million subscribers and adding something in the region of seven million customers per month, China Mobile embarked on the move to 3G about six years ago, with the hope of dealing with the pressure from increasing CAPEX and OPEX.

Mr. Liu explained that there were many different opinions on how to manage China Mobile’s all IP journey.  His advice?  Address the easy stuff first—as such, the operator has almost completed the transformation of its voice network.  Mr. Liu also advised operators to take early action when it comes to IP transformation, as the process is far from being over for China Mobile.

We agree with Mr. Liu’s closing points—operators must invest more in their OSS and network technologies in order to get the most out of IP transformation and continue to ensure a high quality of service for customers.

Later on in the keynote session was an interesting talk on the importance of customer experience.  Panelists Akil Bashir, chairman of Telecom Egypt, Jan Vorstermans, executive vice president of technology and solutions at Telenet, and Steffen Roehn, CIO of Deutsche Telekom, elaborated on the impact of corporate incentivization, segmentation, social networking and more on the customer experience.

The priorities that the speakers believe operators need to focus on for improving the customer experience include simplifying the way they do business with their subscribers, executing service delivery as promised, and communicating what is best for their subscribers in a truthful and straightforward manner.

Like Mr. Bashir, Mr. Vorstermans and Mr. Roehn said, don’t forget to keep the five, critical “A’s”—anybody, anytime, anywhere, authentified and authorized—in mind for enabling the best customer experience.

Stay tuned for more Management World 2010 updates!