A certain whiff from the boys’ locker room has invaded the air. It’s hard to think otherwise when telcos persist in talking up the physical endowment of their infrastructure.
Step up for a dose of Febreze: End users - and particularly enterprises - don’t care about core and access technicalities, how many football pitches your datacenter assets cover, or the number of petabytes transiting your next-generation network.
What they demand is proof on how such infrastructure supports them. But if juvenile posturings rule our industry we fail our customers and we lose money.
The danger signs are here. In a recent Yankee Group survey on managed IT and communications services, a shocking 25% of large European enterprises told us they’d taken outsourced network management services back in house. Third party applications management and desktop management suffered similar fates. The reason: Service providers failed to deliver on promised quality or cost savings.
A key factor in my analysis is that customers and service providers never established a mutual understanding of what each was buying and selling. That’s why I’ve spent considerable time evaluating the use of ITIL in managed services provision. Far beyond a framework for IT service management, ITIL offers a Rosetta Stone bridging the communications gap between enterprise and service provider. Crucially, it also delivers a common means to define, monitor and validate the quality of service provision.
Want to succeed in managed services? Embrace ITIL operationally and as a sales tool. Chew over the fact that ITIL competence is a key purchasing criteria for three quarters of CIOs in major multinationals we also surveyed on managed services across Europe, North America and Asia.
Few service providers accept this reality yet. But worthy of particular praise are BT Global Services and Orange Business Services, along with the global integrator Dimension Data. They’re making profound investments in ITIL to deliver empowered and customer-centric service provision. And they’ re mature enough to express a different view of what infrastructure prowess really consists of.
Break with the past. It wasn’t so long ago that some flamboyant telco CEOs fuelled our delusions of value. Fortunes were made - and then lost - on claimed network length and capacity, and the customer be damned.