|
|
| Own your tech usage |
March 17, 2008 |
From the lofty heights of third place on the Branham300, BCE wants its biggest customers to take ownership of their technology destinies
By Trevor Marshall
BBCE is Canada’s number three tech company by revenue, as measured by the annual Branham300. As such, it might be forgiven for touting technology as the key to success for corporate Canada. And nowhere would one expect to find this technology message more prevalent than in the Bell Enterprise Group, the entity within BCE that delivers communications products and services to the largest organizations, such as governments, financial institutions and retail giants.
 |
“The way forward as a
network provider is to give
my customers the flexibility
to go into our system and
redefine their network
based on an emergency,
a major need, something
they didn’t plan for, or
even simple business growth.” |
- Stéphane Boisvert, President,
Bell Enterprise Group | But what Stéphane Boisvert, a telecom and IT industry veteran and current Bell Enterprise Group president, wants companies to do is understand their business goals and then use them to shape their own tech landscape. He prefers to talk about technology not in terms of what it can do, but how people and companies define their relationship with it.
Boisvert points out that communications networks have changed tremendously over the past few years. For a century, they relied upon point-to-point connections: linking two phones, or a data link to a computer, or one data centre to another. “Today it’s very different. There’s a lot of software we can use in an IP network to design whatever we want,” he said. “There’s a level of complexity that’s very interesting in terms of how an enterprise wants to define its relationship with its suppliers, with citizens and with employees.”
Fundamental questions
This new complexity raises issues, chief among them how companies get organized to leverage these new capabilities, and where they should start. For Boisvert, stepping back from the technology and answering a few basic questions is the best way to proceed. “What are you trying to do in terms of running your business and extending your business? How do you want your customers to relate to you? How do you want to be more efficient in your relationship with your customers? As companies define these, we can define the technology that supports the fundamentals of the business,” he said.
Boisvert uses the financial services sector as an example. Financial institutions may have important physical assets like automatic teller machines and branches, he said, “but what’s really critical is when they look at a customer, they want to know how many products that customer is buying. They can do data mining or business intelligence, which is readily available, and share that through the network to all of the branches so that when John Doe comes in they can interact with him in a traditional discussion and cross-sell something.
“We need to be able to share that information in a very expeditious manner,” Boisvert said, “and we need to have very strong networks to do that.”
A balancing act
Strong networks, no doubt, but also networks that are scaled appropriately to the needs of the business applications that depend upon them. For Boisvert, the design of appropriate applications and networks goes hand in hand. “If a company defines an application and then doesn’t have the bandwidth required to service that application, the customer’s experience could be, ‘Well, that’s the greatest application but it’s as slow as a snail’ and if it takes too much time, people will just give up and never return,” he said. “So even as a company decides it’s going to write a good application it has to make sure the network is rock-solid in terms of accessing it.”
Those companies which take an active role in managing their network requirements stand to benefit the most from hitting the sweet spot between performance and cost, he said. The good news is that this provisioning is increasingly easy to do. He said his group provides a self-management service to a large chain of drug stores. “In each of the franchise and corporate stores, the owner or other staff in the pharmacy can go on the Web and increase, at will, the broadband they want to use to cover peak periods,” he said. “And they can do that on demand: if they need to serve more customers on a Saturday afternoon and it’s going to be really busy, they can plan for it by increasing bandwidth by two or three times what they normally need during the rest of the week to run the business.
“We could also design bandwidth changes that kick in automatically, but if an emergency happens we want to give customers the flexibility to manage it,” Boisvert said. “The way forward as a network provider is I want to give my customers the flexibility to go into our system and redefine their network based on an emergency, a major need, something they didn’t plan for, or even simple business growth.”
That control is important, Boisvert said, because customers and not providers should drive demand and usage. “The network is a utility,” he said, comparing telecom services to electricity, and the provider should only suggest ways to best leverage technology and networks, just as the power company may suggest its customers turn off their lights at night. “We’ll share best practices with our customers, and as a senior business leader I share with my colleagues my own behavior,” Boisvert said, “but that’s the extent of our role in the marketplace.”
In other words, those who rely on networks and other communications technologies will make their own decisions about how they should be used, and determining that depends on what they want to achieve.
BigIdeas Archive
|
|
|
| Top 300 Issue |
 
|
| Gadget of the Week (Canadian) |
|
Parla italiano?
Lingo Voyager 4
If you’re heading out on vacation and you don’t speak the local language, consider picking up a Voyager 4. About the size of a large PDA, it’s a 14-language talking translator that handles English, German, Portuguese, Dutch, French, Spanish, Italian, Russian, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Greek, Arabic and Hebrew.
more>>
|
| Gadget of the Week (Japanese) |
Sounds of Japan
Why record just the visual when you can capture the sounds as well.
more>> |
| Backblog RSS feed |
Click to subscribe  |
|
sponsored by 
