Data reality of today is far from the visions of top-level management
Modern telecom leaders have high expectations for growth and improved business operations as a result of leveraging data. The truth is their organizations are typically far behind.
The truth can too often be described by the rule of 3 – 2 – 1, as experienced by many business stakeholders. At the same time as they are under pressure to deliver data-powered solutions to the market, it requires €3 million of investment and 2 years of lead time to get 1 report out of the data machine. Obviously, this is an exaggeration but much closer to the everyday reality in the frontlines compared to the grand visions of the top management.
Time to value in producing data-driven applications must dramatically decrease
Consider the automobile industry and the transformation it has gone through over the past 140 years. The telecom industry needs to achieve a similar level of transformation around its time-to-value based on data in just a handful of years, let alone 140 of them.
Telecoms are stuck in the same situations that the automobile industry was in when Daimler and Benz produced cars in small workshops, building them one by one. Low time to value was combined with a high unit cost. Things changed when Henry Ford introduced his production line, mass-producing the same car over and over again. Time to value and unit cost went down while the level of customization dropped to zero.
If the telecoms aim to meet the market demands, they need to pay attention to what modern smart manufacturing has done for the car industry — be able to develop purpose-built data applications in both fast and efficient manner.
