There’s the Rub: Service Provider Pain Points

Published in Pipeline

Recently we asked a sample of service provider executives to tell us what keeps them awake at night, to describe their business preoccupations, their sources of botheration.

The many comments we received fall mainly into three categories: investor pressure; service price/performance; systems problems. More specifically:

• Investor pressure: Generating customers, revenue and profits to meet the demands and expectations of investors.
• Service price/performance: Meeting customer expectations for new services at low prices, while increasing the speed with which new products and services can be developed, implemented and supported.
• Systems problems: Managing the ever-increasing complexity of the network and IT infrastructure - and finding more and more money to pay for the care and feeding of the legacy IT environment.

One of our respondents, a CIO in a competitive service provider, pointed out that his list of challenges, the things that keep him awake at night, is pretty much the same as the list he would have drawn up ten years ago, when he worked for a large long-established telco in a non-competitive environment. Surely this can’t be right?…

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To read the rest of Barbara Lancaster’s article, please go to Pipeline.

Barbara Lancaster is President of LTC International Inc.