analogchris

i strive to remain analog in my digital world

[analogchris]

Why is T-Mobile Winning As the 'Un-Carrier'? or When the Telephone Company No Longer Wants To Be a Telephone Company

First, we should probably try and determine why any communications provider, be it a wireless, ISP or cable company, would want to be known as the ‘un-carrier’? Well, we do not have to look very far to find our answer. Advocacy rates – measures used to determine not only the satisfaction of customers but more importantly, how strongly they feel connected to a brand, how much they will proclaim that brand to family and friends, provides a peek at the answer.

The consumer electronics industry is littered with ‘fanboys’ who staunchly defend the validity and prowess of their preferred brands like Apple and Google, not to mention sports entertainment franchises like the NFL teams in the US or FIFA clubs around the world - we know how insanely they defend their brands.

However, historically for communications providers (wireless, ISP and cable,) the advocacy rate is really poor when it comes to measuring how much we consumers love to hate them. In one study IBM found that globally for every advocate for a communication provider, there are 3 antagonists. The 2013 Temkin Experience Ratings(see chart) shows poor ratings for communications providers in the eyes of the consumer as compared to other industries.

We should also consider the massive shift the industry has gone through over the past few years and continues to go through today, as more and more services that were traditionally the domain of the telephone company are now being provided by over-the-top (OTT) providers and social and messaging companies. These companies have long been leaders in social and mobile engagement with consumers and have pushed the envelope of customer experience and free services (it is amazing what we as consumers will endure for a free service!) across all industries and as a result, customers now have higher expectations and demands of their service providers.

Together the combination of the newly empowered consumer and the poor experience history of the industry have combined to create a petri dish, primed to grow a completely new kind of entity: the un-carrier. Imagine you are the fourth largest wireless provider in a saturated and mature market? How do you go about differentiating yourself from the competition? By becoming the antithesis of what consumers think about the industry.

T-Mobile has begun the shift — from a telecom service and network-based company to a customer centric organization — by listening to their customers and delivering solutions in a maverick style that seem to mirror those of its CEO Jon Legere (who was thrown out of a rival’s party at CES this year). Offers like aggressive pricing with no more contracts, no data usage overcharges, the ability to switch mobile phones anytime and data and messaging included – (even internationally) have forced a change in the market that competitors have been forced to react to.

Yes, but does it work, trying to become everything an industry traditionally is not? And how. In the first quarter of 2014 T-Mobile added more subscribers than the number #1 and number #2 market players combined. We've been telling our carriers for years what we think of them (see chart) and perhaps with the success T-Mobile is having the rest of the industry will begin to listen as well.

Long live the ‘Un-Carrier’!

[analogchris]

When The Telephone Company Is No Longer A Telephone Company

The landline phone dominated communication for nearly 90 years with no significant technology advancement. Consumers were largely dependent upon voice as the primary means of communication. Service was provided by large corporations and the barrier to entry for alternatives was so high as to essentially result in a monopoly.

But, the last 20 years has seen an unprecedented advancement in technology, and the communications world has forever changed. The proliferation of cellular devices and the broad adoption of the Internet were points of origin for new ideas, and the vision of pioneering players like Skype and Apple threw gasoline on the burning embers of change creating a firestorm of innovation that would eventually bring us to where we are today – living in a world where what I think of as traditional telephone services may no longer be provided by a traditional communications service provider.

In 1998 nearly all US households used a landline phone, and now it is under 50% and falling. It’s not just cellular taking over, because we are seeing cellular voice services in steady decline too. Grabbing market share today are new voice, messaging and content services – once considered the domain of the telephone company — being offered up by a new breed:  the digital service provider (DSP).

The convergence of over-the-top (OTT), telecommunications and media companies into DSPs is being driven by the expectations and needs of the socially connected consumer.  The proliferation of high speed mobile data, internet-based media delivery and cloud services has begun in earnest. As media, cable and telecommunications companies drive toward non-traditional direct-to-consumer products and services through growth channels like mobile and social, and OTT providers expand to offer traditional communications services like voice and messaging, we are experiencing the birth of the Customer-Activated DSP. This new organization thrives in the burgeoning “API economy” and utilizes rich customer insight and experience management to offer an ever-widening array of digital products and services provided by new relationships with partners and competitors alike.

So are the traditional telephone companies simply out of the picture now, unable to compete in the new world of digital? Absolutely not – or at least not if they are smart and decisive about their commitment to remain relevant to their customers. Traditional CSPs are sitting on a tremendous amount of information and data from a network that makes them very relevant to their customers – as long as they know how to use it. The ability to analyze and personalize offers and experiences relevant to their customers is not the future anymore, it’s the now, and the expectation of all their customers who have been spoiled by innovative retail experiences with Amazon, Apple and LL Bean and the free OTT offerings of companies like Google and Yahoo.

  This past February in Barcelona, Spain, Mark Zuckerberg, CEO and founder of Facebook, got up in front of a room full of telephone company executives to say they should provide free data access to services like Facebook and that he intended to offer 450 million users around the world traditional voice services through recent acquisition WhatsApp. This proclamation represented the final proof that in an industry no longer bound by the traditional barriers to entry, if today’s CSPs wish to succeed, they will have to do so by becoming a utility to provide data connections or by evolving into a diverse DSP themselves offering  non-traditional services and partnering with OTT providers. And as communications providers evolve their services and solutions, their engagement systems are going to have to change as well to provide omni-channel issues across mobile, social and physical. The ability to understand and have a meaningful dialogue with their customers is the key to transforming themselves from a historically antagonistic relationship with their customers to one of advocacy.

The time is now to be bold if today’s telephone companies want to become tomorrow’s digital service providers.

[analogchris]

Why ‘Beacons’ Are Just the Beginning for Personalized Engagement

The term ‘beacons’ or ‘iBeacons’ as the Apple variant of the proximity-detecting devices have been called are all the rage with marketers looking to personalize experiences for their customers. Beacons have become a hot topic lately because with the release of iOS 7.1 Apple has fully embraced software support for the technology embedded in over 250 million Apple devices in use around the world. But Apple is not the first on the beacon bandwagon as companies like Digicash and Paypal have a beacon strategy too. Beacons have been hailed as ‘over-hyped’ in some press clippings and ‘under-hyped’ in others. But what’s the real story – can beacons be the magic bullet for marketers looking to target individuals on their mobile devices? The answer is yes, potentially, but not without some help.

Let’s start with what beacons are and what they are not. A ‘beacon’ is nothing more than a simple device that detects distance between itself and a transceiver chip through a low powered version of the Bluetooth 4.0 standard called BLE (Bluetooth Low Energy). It can detect that distance over a much larger range than other near-field protocols like NFC (Near-Field Communication) and it provides us with a much more precise ability to detect proximity than the traditional methods of Wi-Fi, mobile GPS and cell tower triangulation does. If you use any mobile device tracking solutions like ‘Find My iPhone’ you’ll know that you can find your iPhone… down to about 100 yards give or take signal strength, etc. With a beacon your mobile device could be detected from 10 feet to less than 1 foot in distance.

Sounds great, right? So what’s the catch you say? Well, the ‘catch’ is that a beacon is blind and dumb – it cannot do anything except detect and report distance – it cannot analyze this information and certainly cannot execute upon it – heck by itself the beacon does not even know where it is located physically. That’s where the ‘help’ we mentioned earlier comes in. It takes analytics software like IBM’s Presence Zones to be able to ingest location data from sources like beacons, Wi-Fi, GPS, etc. and turn that into information that can be used by marketers to interact with their customers whose recent travel patterns or current location warrant a personalized offer or dialogue. Marketers can then use their campaign solutions for traditional channels or mobile channels such as Xtify’s Mobile Push technology to enhance the customer’s experience at their location.

So how will all this work in the real world? Well, assume you are at the World Cup championship game and the stadium is jammed. You are waiting in the line for the restroom for a long time – and you are being detected by beacons – and the stadium’s customer support system sends you a mobile notification that the restroom 4 sections down from you has zero wait. Or you are waiting for a bus in Amsterdam and listening to a new DJ you heard at your favorite club last weekend which you are streaming from Spotify. The beacon in the video advertising poster next to you detects you and coordinates with Spotify to change the advertisement to inform you that your favorite DJ will actually be at another club live this weekend – and gives you a digital 2D barcode to capture with your phone giving you details and a discount on the cover charge. Or when you enter your favorite department store, where you have a loyalty membership and their smartphone app, you are detected by their proximity beacons which interact with your mobile app giving you the latest discounts and new products in the areas that you have shared are your favorite directing you to exactly where in the store your interests lie.

So we are back to the start – yes beacons can revolutionize the way marketers interact with their customers – but not without some help. The beacons are just the start – the real value is the analytics and execution of the information gathered from the beacons. For those organizations that build a true strategy for detection, through analysis and execution, the future looks bright.

[analogchris]

Why Is Engagement Critical To xCommerce Success?

IBM CEO Ginni Rometty spoke last week at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain. She talked about three key components of technology that will drive growth in the coming years for communications providers and organizations across industries. The first two were Data (Big Data!), which she described as the ”new natural resource,” and Cloud, driving the ”API economy,” or a vision of hybrid clouds in which any task can be modeled and executed quickly and efficiently to meet any requirement. But the third I think was the big one – somewhat propped up and driven by the first two even: Engagement.

Engagement, in this context, is defined as ”contact by fitting together” or “the act of sharing in the activities of a group.” When considering what Engagement means, perhaps all kinds of things come to mind, but at the core I believe it is about connecting people  – connecting people through new ideas, new opportunities, new ways to educate, new ways to communicate and new ways to innovate.

Ginni said Engagement hangs in the balance of speed, security and personalization (she likes things that come in threes). Speed comes from the cloud and that API economy, security comes as well from our devices; the tools we use to connect. Personalization is the realization of our insight and knowledge of one another and the unique offers and experiences we expose as a result. It is at the core of Engagement.

When it comes to commerce in this new paradigm-shifted cosmos of personalized big data clouds, we have to understand that our customers are ahead of us. They are already comfortable with this new shift, demanding that we, as service providers and retailers, meet them where they live, work and play. Consumers are not just tearing down the traditional walls of the business model for an industry – they are redesigning and rearchitecting it to their wants, needs and desires. Staggering growth in mobile device capability, social media and person-to-person communications, data speeds and accessibility, crypto-currencies and, of course, the Cloud and Data explosions have created an environment that requires organizations to continue to invest in solutions to support these empowered customers with open, flexible commerce solutions.

[analogchris]

Too Much Demand: A Good Problem to Have for Communications Service Providers?

What if everyone wanted more of your products than you could provide? What if they wanted it faster and in greater quantities and more often than ever? Sounds great doesn’t it? But what if they wanted to pay less than ever for larger quantities? What if they didn’t see value in paying for that product or service, just in the free tools and capabilities it enabled provided by other companies? What if you had to spend large amounts of capital to keep providing larger quantities of your product without seeing a proportional increase in revenue for those products?

This is exactly the world that telecommunications providers are living in today – their services (the network essentially) are in more demand than ever before and that demand shows no sign of slowing in the next 10-20 years as the world continues to ingest more data at higher rates than ever before in areas that have never before had connectivity. There have been many concerns expressed even this week at Mobile World Congress that the CSP could look like UPS, FedEx and DHL soon – providing nothing but the transport layer for the goods that flow through – in a situation where the customer expects the service to work perfectly and only when it doesn’t does the service provider cross the mind of the consumer.

  In fact in quite a bold move on Monday this week Mark Zuckerberg, CEO and founder of Facebook stood up and told a room full of telecom providers they should be offering free data services, right after his company announced it had purchased What’s App and would be adding voice services for its 450 million users – which will further put pressure on telecoms in the EMEA region.

Is this necessarily a bad thing? Perhaps not, and there will most definitely be carriers who decide this is an acceptable role in their relationship with the consumer. As network virtualization and IP-based telecommunications services dominate they will bring with them the ability to drastically reduce cost and make this potentially a viable business model. But for many, if not most others, they are not content to cut cost and hope to find a niche to survive in and while some telecom providers like SingTel CEO Chua Sock Koong reject the idea of becoming a ‘dumb pipe’, they recognize the revenue declines in pure network services and are branching out to provide ‘digital life’ and extra value services for customers.

So if providers are going to grow in this new world order how do they do it? Monetize the network. I wrote a blog a year ago this week telling providers they were sitting on a gold mine – they just needed to figure out a way to mine it. Today providers are doing this in a number of ways today – providing subscriber data, enabling machine-to-machine connectivity and AT&T has announced that they will be seeking ‘sponsorship’ data for their network – where companies or events (NFL or FIFA perhaps) might sponsor all data of a particular event or contest over the AT&T network – providing some relief for the end customer.

Some real innovators like Safaricom in Kenya who is enabling their customers over their network to pay rent, make person to person payments and even register new births using an open platform that anyone can subscribe to services from allowing immediate access to their 30 million customers. This partnership with OTT providers puts Safaricom much closer to the value perceived by the customer of the services they receive.

So if providers are going to be offering all these new products and services how are they going to package them up and sell them? How can they manage orders of physical products, physical services and network services that could come from a variety of network partner participants and require different levels of billing, activation and membership? They need to invest in customer-centric insight and order management – a solution that is focused on the customer, not on the product or service-centric; because frankly they don’t know or want to anticipate what services their customers will demand next over their network or what partner will arise to provide it. The solution should have a hyper-focus on the customer; true customer insight, campaign and experience management, omni-channel and mobile first priorities, flexible ability to manage physical and virtual products and services, lightweight and cloud-based with inventory and capacity visibility and status across all fulfillment systems.

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella recently summed up the situation for telcos perfectly: “Any organizational structure you have today is irrelevant because no competition or innovation is going to respect those boundaries.” The providers who move toward this digital service landscape will be nimble and flexible when presented with new challenges and competitors – and based upon the last 5 years – we know those challenges are coming, the question is whether this time we'll be ready for them?

[analogchris]

CxOs Should Be Firmly Focused On The Customer Experience Heading Into the 2014 Mobile World Congress

Mobile World Congress started this week — and again it will bring over 40,000 telecommunications CxO’s to Spain from all over the world.

Every year there seems to be a dominant theme for the industry as this iconic event dawns over the beautiful city of Barcelona. 2013 was the year of ‘Big Data;’ it was everywhere and on everyone’s lips. For 2014, based upon my experiences in the industry and perusing the exhibition booths here I believe the focus this year will be solidly on ‘Customer Experience.’

The continual increasing pressure of over-the-top (OTT) services providers, saturated markets and increasing costs to acquire new subscribers and the increased expectations of the connected consumer have forced communications service providers (CSP) to follow the retail world into the realm of extreme customer experiences creating what we at IBM call the Customer Activated Telecom Provider.

In the fall of 2013, IBM surveyed over 200 telecommunications CxOs from around the world and 9 out of 10 responded they need the ability to quickly deliver new offerings while 71% said they are more concerned with competition from OTT providers than other telecoms. As a result of this pressure, 65% are now focused on customers as individuals instead of segments and 82% are focused on digital and social interactions with customers while only 12% are focused on face-to-face interactions in 2014.

Close collaboration with customers is indeed a dominant focus for telecom executives at the start of 2014. Why? Because as an industry, we have finally realized the impact a customer can have on our organization. Over 60% of respondents said that customers already influence their organizations to a ‘large extent’ and as a result 4 out of 5 industry leaders are looking to ‘digitize’ their front office operations— the systems that touch the customer experience.

  This year at Mobile World Congress telecommunications providers should be focus on delivering extreme customer experiences to differentiate themselves from their traditional and non-traditional competitors.

[analogchris]

How 4K UltraHD TVs Are Going To Be More Expensive Than You Think...

At CES (Consumer Electronics Show) this year one of the biggest pushes for manufacturers is the 4k or UltraHD television set, which at a resolution of 4096 x 2160 essentially has about 4 times as much information displayed than your standard 1080p (1920 x 1280 resolution) television set. If you have seen one in person you know that its very sharp and looks great - except there is very little content for it yet. However, at CES Netflix, Sony and others committed to delivering content in 2014 in the Ultra HD format.

There's a problem though, 1 hour streaming at the NetFlix UltraHD data rate of 15Mbs is going to come in at a whopping 16GB of data consumption. A standard HD movie stream today would only account for 4.5GB of data in that same hour.

Most customers today have virtually unlimited bandwidth for their broadband services since providers like Comcast in the US say that their customers only average 8GB - 10GB of data consumption each month and so they never really pay attention to their overall bandwidth usage. There are those out there (I'm one of them) who have cut their cable ties and are essentially steaming from Netflix, Apple and Hulu a lot. My last few months of consumption for a family of 5 is averaging around 400GB per month.

The problem is that Comcast only includes 300GB of data each month and they charge $10 per 50GB of data over the limit. For most users this has not been a problem in the past but as more and more people with Smart TVs, AppleTVs, Rokus, Chromecast, etc. it is going to become a bigger problem for everyone.

At 15Mbs my family of 5 can consume less than 20 hours of programming each month before we start getting penalty charges from Comcast.

Why? Because all of the sudden, anyone who is streaming 4k movies from providers like Netflix or Apple is going to quickly see what those of us who have cut cable are already seeing - notices from internet providers like Comcast telling us that we use too much data and they plan to start charging for it.

So be careful when looking at that new Vizio 4K UltraHD television set selling for under $1000 because the real cost for that television is going to depend upon how much content you plan on streaming to the set over the next few years.

[analogchris]

Fox Sports 1 Launches On August 17th and Is Missing A HUGE Opportunity to 1-Up ESPN

What is Fox Sports 1? According to their website FAQ it is 'FOX Sports 1 is a new national 24-hour multi-sport cable channel being launched by FOX on August 17, 2013'. The short answer though is that it is ESPN, ESPN2 or ESPNU from the guys at Fox.

For those in the know, and especially those of us who have cut the cord from traditional cable, dish and IPTV providers due to the ever increasing costs and the inability to purchase only by the content I want to watch, the loss of ESPN is one of the main hurdles to cord cutting.

Broadcast isn't a problem if you live in an area that has Over-The-Air (OTA) signal reception or Aereo as a service but ESPN is a real problem since the network is so large and features so many top games on its cable-only networks.

ESPN requires users to have a current account with a cable or IPTV or dish provider in order to stream their content live to a phone, tablet or tv receiver (Roku, AppleTV, etc). This is a real sore point since I, and most of my cord-cutting companions would gladly pay ESPN the $6-10 per month required to watch their networks - including the commercials! - so I could catch my favorite sports.

Now, fast forward to Fox Sports 1, who is going to be severely behind from the get-go and needs every advantage necessary to increase viewership (which can almost exclusively only come from stealing ESPN eyes). They have a golden opportunity to capture the online, ala-carte, cord-cutting enthusiasts by offering something their chief competitor is unwilling to offer.

So what do they do? They copy ESPN. Their FAQ states 'When FOX Sports 1 launches in August, we’ll also be releasing FOX Sports GO, a groundbreaking mobile sports experience for iPhone, iPad, Android devices and web. The app will offer more than 1,100 live games and events from across FOX Sports, FOX Sports 1 and FOX Sports’ 22 regional sports networks. It will also have scores, highlights, news, stats and analysis. Access to games and live events will be free to fans who receive their video programming from a participating cable, satellite or telephone company.'

Snooze. Really Fox? You just missed a golden opportunity to become an innovator but instead the new network just attempts to imitate the market leader it is trying to compete with.

[analogchris]

Did CBS' Leslie Moonves Miss An Opportunity With the Time-Warner Dispute To Be An Innovator?

It has been almost 10 days now that Time-Warner customers in the New York, Los Angeles and Dallas have been without CBS content. While some of those customers are turning to antennas or alternative services like Aereo where available, most appear to just be waiting on the two media monsters to duel it out.

CBS’s networks include the Showtime and TMC premium channels, as well as Flix and Smithsonian, which are all currently blocked from Time Warner Cable customers.

In looking through the dialogue back and forth between the companies there was a small concession offered by Time-Warner that could have completely changed the media consumption game, but CBS showed once again that most large media content providers still have zero desire to actually make their content available directly to the end consumer without mandating large bundling requirements.

Time-Warner Chief Executive Officer Glenn Britt told CBS CEO Les Moonves that he would resume CBS programming if stations are made available individually to customers. Subscribers could then choose which channels they wanted at a separate price for each, and the money would go directly to CBS. “This way, rather than our debating the point, we would allow customers to decide for themselves how much value they ascribe to CBS programming,” Britt said in the letter.

CBS immediately called the proposal a “sham” in a follow-up statement. “Anyone familiar with the entertainment business knows that the economics and structure of the cable industry doesn’t work that way and isn’t likely to for quite some time.”

To date, no significant provider of popular content in the United States has made available their content purely ala-carte (save the adult premium channels) via a cable company or direct to the consumer via the PC, tablet or smartphone. HBO does provide this service in the Nordic region of Europe and ESPN does the same for packages like college football in Europe. However, they refuse to offer the same services to US customers.

The cable companies and media providers are eventually going to have to come to terms with the fact that consumers are more and more looking to pay for the content that they want to consume and are not interested in subsidizing hundreds of channels full of C- quality reality shows and home shopping infomercials.

Moonves and CBS had the perfect opportunity to become known as the leader in the new marketplace and let their content stand on its own providing their customers with flexibility and ease of use light years beyond their competitors. Instead they decided against thinking outside the box and leading a revolution to instead pull back into the turtle shell and just keep fighting for the same tired system we have been living with for the last 30 years.

Soon a brave content provider/owner or Internet innovator is going to take the lead (Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg or Mark Cuban please help!) and when they do the dam is going to burst. When it does CBS will be forced to go along as well becoming a follower instead of an innovator. 

[analogchris]

Act Like A Startup - Reinventing The K-12 Technology Strategy

I have been around technology for a long time - my father bought the family an Apple IIe back around 1980 and I have never looked back. I've worked for small companies, huge corporations, start-ups and in-betweens. Over all that time I've come to the determination that schools are trying to pretend to be something they are not and as a result they are burdening themselves with huge capital expenditures and preventing their ability to stay on the same technology curve as their students.

Schools Are Not Mega-Corporations - They Are (Huge) Startups K-12 schools are not huge conglomerates, and their IT organizations should not be structured like them. Having an IT organization that mirrors large corporations with lots of local file servers, databases, e-mail servers, etc. is insane. The cost of maintaining that technology and upgrading it in a timely manner is monumental. It is one thing to get a one-time grant or have a one-time capital campaign to raise the initial investment, it is quite another to keep up with that technology over time. It results in a continued spend on technology that is not necessary and causes the school to fall further and further behind the technology curve its students are advancing at home and through mobile devices. This brings inconsistency at best to the technology in the school and at worst the investment is useless (what good does it do to give everyone tablets if the school WiFi system cannot be accessed from everywhere on campus or cannot handle the load?).

Instead K-12s need to think like startups - perhaps really big startups. If you have never been a part of a startup let me give you the quick and dirty: no capital expenditures, anywhere, ever if possible - because frankly cash is tight (sound familiar?). Borrow what you can and offload the rest to the cloud. Think lean and mean, keep as little technology on site that requires a specialist as possible to minimize IT staff costs. Now, huge startups like a K-12 (individual schools may be dealing with a 1000 users or 100,000 users for districts) have to have some kind of infrastructure but the through process should remain the same.

Its Not Rocket Science - Breaking It Down Developing an overall plan for K-12 schools is actually fairly simple if you stick to a simple set of focal points. Everything else should fall underneath these basic guidelines. Before detailing those opportunities, however, it is important to articulate several assumptions that must be accepted prior to moving forward with the strategy I am putting forth here.

1. Internet bandwidth usage is on the rise and will continue to grow – especially in mobile platforms. By the end of 2012 more data was transmitted in two months than was transmitted in all of 2008. Fully 97% of all teens aged 12-17 are now online and 80% of those online teens are users of social media sites.

2. Our society is increasingly using portable/mobile technology platforms to access information and even more importantly, to collaborate with each other. 234 million Americans aged 13 and older use a mobile device and 101 million of them are using smartphones.

3. As a result of the first two assumptions there is a massive shift toward network/cloud – based storage and application environments. Cloud-based technology allows organizations the ability to off-load cost and labor intensive activities related to information technology (IT) operations and focus instead of their core skill sets, reducing cost and human resource overhead. Gartner predicts that by 2016 five times as much data will be stored in the cloud by the average consumer than 2013.

4. Three distinct levels constitute the ecosystem of almost every K-12 technology environment: Network Systems, Corporate Systems and User Systems. Each level contains physical devices/infrastructure and software applications. Any device/application should be aligned to one of these three levels. This provides a basis for identification of systems and classification within the budget for refresh and boundary of ownership responsibility.

Network Infrastructure K-12 schools (and school systems) should consider developing and expanding core network infrastructure as the primary focus. The goal should be rolling out campus-wide connectivity that is scalable and flexible, providing access points throughout every building at a minimum of gigabit ethernet (~1000Mbs theoretical) speeds at physical connections and a minimum of wireless-n (~300Mbs theoretical) speeds for wireless connections when possible to user devices. Higher bandwidth options (10 gigabit Ethernet or equivalent fiber) should be utilized when possible for cross campus connectivity.  The primary ongoing cost here will be focused on the Internet connection, which should be a very high speed (50Mbs+) and scalable solution such as metro ethernet. A network-level access security plan and strategy should be in place as well. The largest percentage of overall capital budget spend should be focused here as it is the foundation for all other systems.

Once completed the core infrastructure would allow for IP systems to be used campus-wide allowing for the freedom of teaching and communication anywhere on campus, the ability to upgrade/enhance corporate systems like the PBX (phone system), e-mail, etc. and to allow full rich multi-media access and sharing from anywhere on or off campus. It also lays the groundwork for advanced capabilities such as video capture and distribution of classroom teaching, theater and arts and sporting events.

Corporate Systems Every single K-12 should immediately begin exploring the options around streamlining and minimizing the number of corporate systems that are required to be run locally on servers. A focus should be put on attempting to move as many solutions to the cloud as possible to eliminate as much cost in operations, maintenance and energy as possible. For all new applications schools should look primarily at cloud-based solutions unless there is a compelling capability or cost issue that cannot be addressed. A significant amount of cost savings could be available at the corporate system level.

I would highly recommend that schools look in particular at e-mail/collaboration software. Solutions such as Microsoft Office 365 for Education and Google Apps for Education present compelling, cost effective (even no-cost) solutions that even can include cloud-based file storage for the students and faculty/staff significantly larger than can usually be provided locally at a significantly reduced cost. The Microsoft solution even has options for network/IP based Lync server, which would replace completely the school-wide phone system with a unified communications platform at a minimal user cost per month.

The move to cloud-based computing applications opens up tremendous opportunity for flexibility along with cost savings and higher productivity. Access to corporate systems would be available from anywhere at any time without requiring specific software beyond a web browser or mobile app. Students could get assignments, share information and exchange work with their teachers and staff could work as efficiently remotely as they do on campus. This expansion of usage would allow the connection of the entire school community and should lead to significant side benefits such as a reduction or elimination of almost all copying costs required due to the simplicity and ease of sharing digital assets and data immediately with any part of the internal community. Students, faculty, staff and families would have immediate access from any location, on campus or off to their information.

User Systems User systems are perhaps where K-12s have the greatest opportunity to significantly increase its technology stance with the school community and make a significant leap forward in technology usage. As there are significant differences in the approach to faculty/staff and student computing they will be addressed here separately. Currently, for students, based upon the assumptions made earlier in this document, I strongly that the burden of ownership of end user devices for the student community needs to shift, as it is untenable in its current state for most schools who do not have a 1:1 technology program funded by students. Most schools are already behind on providing computing devices to its students as it is and most students have access at home to computing devices and technology that exceeds that provided by the school. The cost for even the current level of computing provided in student labs is prohibitive. Whether you like it or not BYOD (bring your own device) is coming, a solution that allows students to utilize any computing device of their choice as long as it meets some minimum technology standards. There are many schools who have moved to a 1:1 type of solution to provide each student their own device but I believe in the long run it will be BYOD that is the most cost effective and desirable to students. Faculty and staff should continue to be supported with alike devices provided by the school, however, if the school decides to offer BYOD solutions to the student population they should offer the same, where possible to faculty and staff. Regardless of the ultimate direction chosen by the school for user systems there should be security and acceptable use guidelines for technology usage while at the school or using school equipment drawn up and distributed that must be accepted prior to enrollment or employment as soon as possible.

With each student communicating and interacting with identical capability, regardless of device type, all kinds of collaboration becomes available. Students can actually work together on the same document, editing and updating back and forth while both working from their own home – and their teacher can review and make comments on the same document giving them both real-time access to feedback. Teachers can immediately share documents, instant message back and forth with students and provide assistance via video chats while working directly with the student on their project files.  Beyond the benefits of flexibility is the benefit of inherited upgrades. With the students bringing their own devices the school no longer has to worry about the user device maintenance and keeping up with updates and upgrades; the upgrade path is built into the model and inherent to normal upgrade patterns students perform at home. Because of the flexibility provided by the infrastructure upgrades and the adoption of cloud-based applications almost any future device will have the ability to work within the school's ecosystem.

While this blog is in no way exhaustive, I believe that the core essence of the recommendations being made are supported clearly – ubiquitous and scalable Internet access anywhere on campus, a shift toward cloud-based applications and collaboration solutions to reduce cost and decrease complexity and a re-direction in sourcing logic for the acquisition and deployment of general-use computing systems to the student population.

If a K-12 can implement the blueprint described above, they can expect to see dramatic changes in the way the teachers and students work together and interact by removing technology impediments that exist today and opening up new opportunities for creativity and the usage of technology throughout the curriculum.

[analogchris]

4 Ways K-12 Schools Can Enhance The Customer Experience

I have recently spent an increasing amount of time working with the K-12 private school community (although this concept is certainly beneficial to the public community as well) to try and help them understand the value of their 'customers', which apparently is not a word that K-12 administrators actually use a lot. I hear customers more often referred to as families, students or even constituents. These are of course all fine but when one gets down to the nitty gritty - they are customers and need to be treated as such. 

"A customer (sometimes known as a client, buyer, or purchaser) is the recipient of a good, service, product, or idea, obtained from a seller, vendor, or supplier for a monetary or other valuable consideration." - Wikipedia

The private K-12 market in the US itself is declining due to a variety of factors including the huge influx of charter schools, the economic turmoil in the last few years and the declining funds available to faith-based school organizations such as Catholic schools which have shown dramatic declines in the past few decades.

However, there are many private K-12 schools that are struggling with another issue: the perception of their role and who they are serving and how those expectations might not match those of their customers any longer. K-12s need to come to the understanding that they are serving a customer with a very long tail who is their greatest asset - or greatest threat if ill-treated. The focus has to be on delighting the customer at every single experience.

"We are shifting to an experience economy where experience is becoming the primary economic offering." - Joseph Pine

Lets be honest and clear here, while there are schools that may offer different facilities, a unique piece of curriculum or specialized pieces of the arts, etc. for the most part schools that are priced in the same range offer the same overall services to their customers. So if you are a private school in suburban Chicago and your middle school tuition is $10,000 most likely you are going to have very similar offerings to the other 4 options in a 20 mile radius with tuition from $8,000 to $12,000 (outside a median range of 20% we see price as a major factor for selection). This means you have to differentiate your offerings from other schools and there is only one way to do that - significantly outpace your competition with exceptional customer experiences. And one of the biggest complaints I constantly hear from parents whose children attend K-12 private schools is that their inquiries, questions and opinions are consistently delayed, lost or in many cases just ignored. This is a recipe for disaster. No wonder the retention rates at some schools are dipping so much.

 "22% of customers expect a response immediately, 19% within an hour and 47% within 24 hours." - American Express Survey

So, how do we change our approach? Here are a few ideas to get you started:

1. Create A Communications Strategy - Before you can begin doing anything you must create a strategy. This does not have to be a long, drawn out process. It just needs to be focused and easily understood and delivered by anyone in the employment of the school. A communications strategy determines what methods will be used by the school to communicate, who is empowered to answer/discuss certain requests or topics, what the overall mission statement and goals are of the school in order to guarantee that all responses and communications to customers fall within the boundaries of those guidelines. This should be in place immediately at every school - and it can grow over time so do not get bogged down in minutia. Anything is probably better than what you have right now!

2. Dialogue Obsessively - Over the years many K-12 private schools have created an aura of an Ivory Tower where the administration looks down upon the community and determines who is worthy for inclusion in dialogue and attention. This is not acceptable as an engagement model any more. For those students and parents who have invested many, many thousands of dollars with your organization (and even those who have not) you must communicate and you must do so on your customer's terms, not yours. Every faculty, staff or administrator needs to be empowered to communicate on behalf of the school and to do so quickly and efficiently based upon the communications strategy. There should be FAQs and forums available to the community to find answers and there should be a centralized repository of ALL inquiries that come to any member of the faculty, staff or administration so we can understand which questions are being asked over and over and better understand which of our policies or practices is causing grief among our customers - and fix them. No more secrets, acknowledging and fixing issues quickly is far more valuable than trying to pretend they did not exist. Make it super easy for your staff to engage your customers (or they will not do it) and make it mobile as well so it can be done from anywhere. However, even if you just have a phone and e-mail for now do not wait for more technology, just do the best you can with what you have right now.

3. Respond Within 3 Hours - There is zero reason at all that this shouldn't be 1 hour for staff or administrators. Teachers get a short pass because frankly they have to actually teach class! This does NOT mean you have to have a complete answer to someone's issue or concern in 3 hours, that could take 3 weeks. It means you acknowledge them and respond in the same manner in which they contacted you (Twitter, Facebook, E-mail, etc.) letting them know if you have an answer or if not how you intend to get them one. This is easy stuff people!

4. Happy Employees = Happy Customers - Organizations that recognize, support and reward their greatest resources, their employees, are by far the most successful. Happy and engaged teachers are the number one creators of advocacy for a school - since they are the predominant communicators to the customer on a continuous basis. When your staff is feeling supported and rewarded they will make your customers feel the same. A quick true story (lifted from this article):

When a travel-weary family of four checked into Chicago’s Hotel Allegro in the middle of the night, the two boys, both under 10, asked hopefully at the front desk about the possibility of a goldfish for their room. It wasn’t as odd a request as it sounds—the Allegro is a part of the Kimpton chain, which makes goldfish available during a guest’s stay at some locations. But unfortunately for the parents, the Allegro is not one of them.

Linton Murphy, a bellman at the property, overheard the crestfallen kids. He set out immediately on a 10-minute walk to the chain’s Hotel Monaco, which does have goldfish for guests, and talked the night manager into loaning one out. Not long after, Murphy appeared at the door of the beleaguered family, pet in hand—along with a note from the fish that gave it a name and a backstory.

The family was thrilled, and the father took time to send a note to Niki Leondakis, COO of Kimpton Hotels & Restaurants. Shortly thereafter, she ran into Murphy and asked him why he had gone to the trouble. His response? “When my kids are unhappy, my wife is unhappy. When my wife is unhappy, I am unhappy. I just imagined that poor guy stuck in that hotel room and those kids not letting up about the fish,” he explained, adding, “I love my job. I get to do anything I want to make someone happy.”

Stories like that abound at Kimpton properties, which are well known for their high level of customer service, as well as for being great places to work. Leondakis says that’s no coincidence. “Taking care of our employees comes before taking care of our guests,” she says. “There’s no way the guests are going to have a great experience if our employees are unhappy.”

This is how you create customers for life. Be known as a great place to work!

It is not rocket science but something that most K-12 private schools simply overlook. Your goal should be to delight your customer at every opportunity - you will create amazing advocates for your school who will promote you and defend you with vigor and zeal!

[analogchris]

Better Customer Experience Means Thinking Mobile First For Sports Venues

Over the past few years the television and online coverage of sporting events has become truly amazing. Sitting on my couch I have the ability to watch in glorious high-definition almost any sporting event in the world live. Depending upon my media provider I also have the 'second screen' ability to gather additional data and interact with my social peers on my smartphone or tablet in real time about what is happening at the event. I can see multiple camera angles, get access to instant replay and I can pause the action to get up and go to the restroom without missing anything. Frankly I have probably have a BETTER seat than my counterparts at the stadium or arena hosting the event.

Since 2007 nearly 70% of all US households have acquired at least one HDTV set and 60% of all US subscribers have adopted smartphones.

Also since 2007 the National Football League (NFL) has seen its stadium attendances in steady decline, college football in the US recently hit its lowest attendance rates in almost 10 years and NASCAR auto racing ticket revenues have fallen as much as 38%.

This is a real problem for sports venues and one not easily solved. This is especially true for the connected consumer who attends the event live where the mass amount of people has saturated the mobile network  preventing using a smartphone for making a call, much less to access data while his friends back at home are all interacting and communicating during the event.

Most reports indicate that blackouts do not work and inadvertently punish elderly or disabled fans. So how do venues get fans back in the stands?

They need to think mobile first. We are a mobile and connected people now and becoming more so each and every day. Once connected our smartphones become an integral part of our lives - in fact many of us struggle to do without them for any period of time. They are the key for marketers and service providers looking for a way to communicate and interact with us because we are almost never without them. And if done right, mobile applications can be used to make our everyday experiences easier and better.

The NFL is now moving toward actually trying to improve the experience at stadiums by offering free Wi-Fi and mobile apps for watching replays and getting broadcast commentary. Reports from the 2013 NFL championship game in New Orleans indicate that perhaps 1 terabyte of data flowed from the fans, a significant increase from the year before proving that while we are at live events we still want to be connected to our social networks to share the event.

Major League Baseball (MLB) is taking it even further, hoping that adding Wi-Fi and the ability to stream the broadcast while in your seat will make for a BETTER experience than the one you could get at home. They are even adding features like ordering food for delivery right to your seat and giving you the ability to dynamically upgrade your seat, even after the game has already started!

So head out to the old ballpark this Spring for a game with your smartphone and you just might be surprised how much BETTER your seat is!

[analogchris]

As goods and services become commoditized, the customer experiences that companies create will matter most.

Joe Pine & Jim Gilmore

[analogchris]

For CSPs, The Network Itself Is The New ‘Gold’

Wrapping up my meetings with analysts and telecommunications providers here at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain this week I had time to reflect on a couple key constants: Everyone seems to agree that the two most valuable assets that communications service providers (CSP) possess are their massive amounts of customer data and their physical networks. These are also their largest advantages over over-the-top (OTT) service providers who are relentlessly shifting the value of the customer experience to themselves instead of the CSP.

There is an abundance of material available from organizations like IBM on the value of this data when it is converted to information and used to personalize interactions with customers.  Instead, I want to focus on is the second asset that providers hold – one that many of them have come to think of as somewhat of an burden, especially when they see the OTT providers saturating their networks with little remuneration. They have always seen the network as their ‘gold mine,’ of course, but they have run out of the rich veins that used to be voice and messaging in recent years. The only vein they think they have left to mine is data and it is a volatile commodity. But the fact is they are sitting on a gold mine and many of them do not know how to mine the new vein of gold – the network itself.

So what does it take to mine this rich new vein of gold? It takes a fundamental change in the approach to a CSP network. Traditionally the network has been viewed as a proprietary system of technologies to provide a finite set of services that the CSP believed their customers desired. But most CSPs have a limited set of human and capital resources and so can only provide a limited set of services.

It was during a few of the meetings this week that one of my brilliant colleagues, Anthony Behan (@telcomatrix), brought up Amazon and Facebook. He said that they didn’t become multi-billion dollar behemoths in their industry until they turned their network – into a platform. And he is exactly right. When I went to my first Salesforce.com conference there were about 3,000 people in attendance, all users of the Salesforce.com CRM application. Shortly after, they announced the Force.com platform that allowed anyone to develop an application on the cloud platform for nominal cost. About 4 years later I went back to the conference to find over 25,000 people in attendance, and nearly 100 companies there that had built their businesses on the Force.com platform.  They had turned their network into a platform that became an ecosystem.

There are a few CSPs who are finally getting this (AT&T is one of note) and have begun to shift their networks in this direction.  This week at MWC, I spent a lot of time with Deustche Telekom (DT), a CSP who definitely gets it.  IBM partnered with the B2B2X group at DT to provide machine-to-machine (M2M) solutions for the Mobile World Congress Connected City concept.

To undertake this effort, DT has made two major changes.  First, its entrepreneurial B2B2X group has been working like a startup within the larger organization.  Second, DT has transformed its network into a platform that is now becoming an ecosystem. They have released the Developer Garden, an open set of APIs and services that let developers and creators collaborate and access services provided over the network like geo-location and billing services – and it is working. The ecosystem is growing at a rapid pace and, based on the reception they received after their new product announcement, becoming a model for other CSPs around the world who are still trying to figure how to mine this new gold.

Service providers need to understand they do not have the bandwidth or the capital to respond as fast as the market is changing – and they need to enable the participants in the market to help them do that – the miners who will harvest their gold for them.

[analogchris]

NFC For Mobile Payments Is Going Nowhere Until Somebody Gets The Customer Experience Right

So another Mobile World Congress has now come and gone and there were some interesting movements amongst the communications providers and technology vendors this year. More and more it seems the majority of coverage on the event is focused on the glitzy product releases and announcements made by the consumer solutions and this year was no different.

However, unlike last year that had significant launches of new devices, this year focused more on services for the consumer. At the top of the list was Near Field Communication (NFC), which has been touted for several years as the ability to finally get consumers to use their handsets for secure communication on a mass scale – primarily with payment systems. Even though several million devices have been sold with NFC technology it has been slow to take hold. It was promoted at every turn by the GSMA this year at Mobile World Congress though as a tool for entry or retrieval of information but to make it big NFC really does have to go hand in hand with payments and this year there was also an abundance mobile payment and wallet announcements at the conference. The numbers of companies or organizations offering some sort of mobile payment solutions were too numerous to count (I stopped trying at 12) and it is not like it was any particular type of company either. It was startups, financial and banking organizations and even communications service providers themselves offering choices. 

The systems in Asia are particularly mature and showed how easy it was to retrieve discount coupons or information updates from a kiosk in a public area with NFC but that did not require any type of secure transaction since no money was changing hands.  When it came time to actually pay for something the effort is more significant. For instance, when testing SK Telecom’s ZooMoney that I was given an NFC handset, which I used to rub over the NFC reader at the point-of-sale system. Then I was presented with a question as to whether I agreed with the amount on the screen. Fine, I did. Then the cashier had to finalize the agreed to amount and I waited for another prompt. Then I was prompted to enter a PIN number.  After that I was asked to finally confirm. At that point I was given a receipt. Um… that was ‘cool’ but I could have been done in half the time if I would have just handed over my Amex when I walked up. And it also became clear that most of the systems for now seem to be limited to a particular country or region when I was told that they had recently gotten agreements to allow the system to work in Japan as well as South Korea.

And I’m not picking on SK Telecom because their system is actually one of the more polished solutions. The problem is bigger than that and as I said it was ‘cool’ but it still did not make my experience making payments any better. And that is the primary reason I believe we have have not seen Apple adopt the technology yet. They have stated over and over again that they do not and will not care about technical specifications (world’s fastest phone posters were all over MWC - who cares?) and raw capabilities because those are meaningless additions to cost and battery life (both precious in the handset space – how do I make a payment when I left my real wallet at home and now my phone battery is dead?) if they make no positive impact on the user experience. The other massive assumption we are making is that all the vendors of the world will add NFC capable solutions to their systems – not going to happen until they perceive themselves to be at a disadvantage for not having it. We have only just gotten mobile credit card systems for small shops on the go (ala Square and the like).

If you really want to make worldwide simple payments from a device work you are going to have to solve a few things and learn from the successes in emerging markets.

1. Digital Cash. Paypal and its knockoffs are great for ordering off of eBay or Amazon but if I’m on the go I need the option to use ‘cash’ that I am not carrying. This means no authentication and the ability to carry it ‘locally’ without Internet. It also means supporting a digital currency like BitCoin that was designed specifically for this purpose. Make it the same as carrying cash in my wallet and while I would understand the risks of carrying ‘cash’ my larger portfolio is not at risk. This also takes out the issues of availability in multiple countries – and the system should offer me onscreen conversion of what I paid for the BitCoin(s) in my home currency. That way when I’m in China or in Brazil I know what I actually paid for that soda or taxi ride.

2. Biometric Security. Having to enter a bunch of PIN numbers and entering them over and over does not make my experience any better. It frustrates me and makes me wish I had broken the $20 bill on the pack of gum anyway. Having the ability to permanently use biometric information stored for myself or others I designate as authorized to spend money by simply putting my thumb on a screen or a button means no PINs and faster processing. And it is even more secure, sort of like having a big black leather wallet with one of those chains on it hooked to your jeans like the Harley Davidson guys wear.

3. Learn From The Unbanked. It has to be as easy (easier even) as sending a text message like they do to make payments in Africa. The reason it is so hard to get people to adopt the technology in mature markets is that the credit card companies have done such a good job of making it easy to use the card users to buy almost anywhere without cash – and we do not (knowingly) pay those 3-5% transaction fees so we do not care. In areas of the world where the vast majority of people do not have checking accounts, savings accounts, investment accounts, etc. they have been using their phones to make payments – because the carriers in those regions have made it easy to do so. Make it easier and people will adopt it.

4. Beg Apple To Put A Chip In The iPhone 6. This is obviously a bit tongue-in-cheek but you know that if Apple decided to offer NFC support they would have already thought through most of the issues raised above and would have a way to make the customer experience better. And in the end they may be the only company out there right now that has the clout and foresight needed to pull the whole ecosystem together anyway.

I envision the day when I can walk up to a Coca-Cola machine, a Disney ticket kiosk or a movie theater and select my product choice, place my thumb on my phone and tap it to the kiosk and move on. There is no technological reason I cannot do it today but no one yet has come up with a compelling user experience that goes beyond ‘cool’ and is just plain better.

[analogchris]

Watch Out CSPs, The Over-The-Tops Want To Become The New Telcos

I'm here at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain this week and an idea struck me today that I suppose I should have seen before.

There have been countless examples over the past few years of over-the-top (OTT) service providers taking customer revenue and value away from the traditional providers. Companies like Skype, Apple, Netflix and YouTube consume tremendous amounts of bandwith on carrier networks but don't offer any real benefits to the carriers beyond any data usage charges they may have. The concern, rightly so to an extent, is that the OTT services are turning the telecommunications providers into 'dumb pipes' of data between two points across the Internet. They were continuing the debate here at MWC even yesterday.

Over the past few years the service providers have been responding with OTT-like services of their own in order to capture or retain some level of relevancy with their customers - anything to try and make their brand more valuable than a fast data connection. Some have even been pretty successful, especially those that were able to watch the mature market OTT providers first and see what worked and copy it before the OTT providers could (or were allowed to) mobilize in the lagging markets. Rogers One Number service enables users to dial and receive their calls and text messages on their computer, as well as switching in mid-call between the phone and the computer ala Google Voice. T-Mobile Bobsled is a pure OTT play that offers voice calling, group messaging with cloud synchronization ala Skype. Indonesia’s Telkomcel has gone one step further and created a special unlimited data plan offering that includes OTT WhatsApp messaging service.

But now we are seeing a move by OTT providers the other way - one that could be seismic in the future. The OTT providers are moving toward becoming full fledged telco 2.0 providers. I say telco 2.0 because their communications services are based upon IP data services and not traditional voice or sms networks.

Google Voice is now actually been at this a while having developed full fledged voice, messaging and voicemail services and made them available across most consumption devices in the US several years ago. And in the US they have started to roll out Google Fiber for broadband internet in selected markets - for free. More recently Facebook announced they would offer free voice communication services to its 169+ million users in the US and they just announced a deal with 18 providers across 14 countries to provide messaging services. And then there's Microsoft. Not an OTT provider you say? They are now that they have purchased Skype, one of the largest providers of OTT services in the world and a catalyst for most telcos when discussing OTT concerns. What you might not also know is that Microsoft has a history or investing directly in telecommunications including $1 billion investment in Comcast and a $5 billion investment in AT&T. Don't count them out to expand the potential of Skype by purchasing outright the ability to carry traffic, especially in non US markets.

Just like the original OTT services the US seems to be the testing/proving ground but this is coming to the rest of the world and like OTT 1.0 services it will be here before you know it - corporations with massive funding and innovative and disruptive cultures are coming, and they want to be the phone company.

[analogchris]