The TM Forum has many initiatives underway to help identify, codify and automate best practices and processes that make telecom and cable service providers as well as enterprises and defense contractors more streamlined and competitive. It even has a few underway designed to nudge service providers in certain directions to prepare them for the changes they may have to make to remain relevant and profitable in a changing, pressurized market.
Forum president and CTO, Martin Creaner, took time from his duties at the forum’s Management World Conference in Nice last week to discuss two of them with B/OSSS editor Tim McElligott: Business Benchmarking and Mobile Advertising. The forum issued reports on each initiative at the event.
 |
| TM Forum's Martin Creaner |
On the advertising initiative:
We’ve been discussing advertising for almost 18 months and while we have had a number of good Content Encounter demonstrations, we haven’t made much progress developing [tools] yet. When we get involved in a new area, we want to make sure we are doing something that brings value to our members involved in that activity. Advertising hasn’t ticked that box yet for me, but the advertising report we released this week is a start; it’s the first valuable deliverable coming out of this effort. It begins to broaden the knowledge and discussion about what the challenges are here. I am quite pleased with it.
In his keynote speech yesterday, [Ogilvy Group Vice Chairman] Rory Sutherland — who was involved in the report — made it clear that what the advertising report brings out more than anything else is that the success or failure of advertising is a social psychology challenge, not a technical challenge.
How can the forum help on that front?
Well, right, we are not psychologists, but maybe one of the contributions we can make, besides doing the technology, is to raise the flag to let people know that technology is a necessary but insufficient criterion when it comes to advertising. Rory is a great thinker; he has lots of ideas. But incorporating them into a high-level discussion is one thing; incorporating them into the practices is another. For example, one practical thing we are doing is extending the SID (Shared Information Data) model into the customer area. The SID’s common information model was designed from the point-of-view of the telco interaction with the customer, not the sort of interaction that Rory Sutherland was talking about, but his ideas help us look at radical ways of expanding the customer information model and the SID, so [service providers] can capture the right data. We can put the right fields into the information model to allow the capture of the enhanced type of information that will make carriers successful. Information is a big area where we can contribute.
