Back-Office Bright Spot at Economic Summit

Rich said Verizon was cited recently as a growth company despite the economic turn, but questioned what most companies need to do to “get through the knot hole and go from being a safe company to a more attractive growth company.”

Hutcheson said companies still need new products that have real value, but first they must survive. “To do that you have to keep serving your core business and gain efficiency, then you have to keep deploying capital and introduce new products,” he said.

Eslambolchi said it is just as important not to lose focus on network diversity and performance. “Investment has to be shifted into the edge of the network to make it have the same reliability as the core. If you do that during this downturn, you’ll end up coming out of it with Six Sigma-like performance on which consumers can add new services. That’s where growth will come from,” he said. “If that investment doesn’t occur, we will come out of this recession in the same situation we went in. And if you take efficiency up to the next level, you’ll come out of this a winner.”

Eslambolchi said there is so much automation and efficiency to do he can’t even categorize it all. And instead of laying off workers, he suggests retraining them so they can contribute to the growth on the other side of the crisis.

“The last thing I would do would be to stop investing in the network,” Eslambolchi said. He said companies could use this time to do the transformations they have been putting off. He suggested four key areas for transformation: IT and the customer experience, network transformation to convergence, services and culture. “The bigger the company, the bigger the challenge,” he said.

He also sees investments in technology such as LTE as a strategic investment that should not be curtailed.

Willetts said that despite the industry’s best efforts, software processes still are distinctly 20th Century. “IT needs to be much more effective,” he said. He warned against taking the auto industry’s approach. “It’s not that they didn’t know how to build cars more efficiently, it’s that they didn’t do anything about it. And today, every car is carrying additional costs because they refused to change.”

Hutcheson said recessions are very Darwinian and help to cleanse marginal companies and management teams that he says will fall by the wayside in what he sees as a protracted recession. He also said that if a company plans to transform its management team, it shouldn’t hold back. Reshuffling won’t do, he said. “Changing the culture of a company starts with changing management.”