I Want It Now! Getting New Service to Market Quickly Is Getting More Important

By nature, I’m an early adopter, always on the lookout for the next new product or service that will make my life that tiny bit easier or allow me to save a crucial few minutes a day. Not surprisingly, this makes me an easy mark for my service provider, who knows it doesn’t take a lot of persuading to sign me up for their latest new service.

But despite the staggering jump in smartphone usage – market researcher comScore recently reported a 60 percent annual increase in the number of US smartphone subscribers – service providers aren’t rolling out new products and services as quickly as you’d expect to meet the demand for new services from subscribers eager to maximize the use of their new devices.

It’s not because reducing time-to-market isn’t seen as important, as the results of a just-published Amdocs survey reveal. The global survey revisited an earlier poll conducted by Coleman Parkes Research in 2008, and found that time to market has increased in importance: 70 percent of the service providers polled in 2011 said time to market was very important, up from 59 percent in 2008. But there’s a downside: The number of service providers who are able to bring a product to market within six months has actually fallen slightly. In 2008, 67 percent of service providers said it took six months or less to bring a new product to market, compared with 65 percent today. The survey was based on qualitative interviews of 125 senior executives from 50 wireless, 50 wireline and 25 cable service providers in Europe, Latin America, North America and Asia-Pacific.

There are a number of reasons for the fact that time-to-market is in a holding pattern, including the time needed to ensure support for third-party services, such as app stores or IPTV and additional connected devices. But the survey clearly shows that for most service providers (almost 60 percent of those polled), the main inhibitors to improving time to market are their complex technology environment and the inflexibility of existing systems and processes.

And on top of this, there are the costs, with 50 percent of service providers seeing their costs of providing new services increase by 15 percent. Again, this is directly linked to the complexity of their current systems. Due to the numerous legacy systems and hard-coded “spaghetti" processes surrounding them from past changes, it simply takes service providers too long to change both their processes and systems for new projects. And any change also significantly impacts existing products as well.

On the plus side, the survey highlights the fact that those service providers who do invest in addressing operational challenges can improve their time to market and beef up their bottom line. Thirty-three percent of service providers reported that they had improved their time to market by an impressive average of 20 percent. And when asked for the key factors enabling this improvement: 81 percent cited improved project management and control; 76 percent said it was a result of improving organizational alignment and 65 percent reported business and operational support systems integration.

Sometimes it really is a case of making an investment today to reap the benefits of a faster time to market tomorrow. Or to paraphrase “Field of Dreams," the great baseball movie: “If you build new services quickly, they will come." (OK, maybe that line won’t win an Oscar, but you know what I mean.)

And as far as I’m concerned, my next new smartphone service can’t come quickly enough. 

Rebecca Prudhomme is vice president of Product & Solutions Marketing at Amdocs . She currently leads Amdocs’ entire global team of product marketing professionals focused on bringing to market Amdocs’ products, services and solutions.