The Power of Networking: Managing the Paradox of “Doing More with Less”
by Mark Glucki on Nov 17 at 12:35 pm
This morning at the Board of Trade Metropolitan Montreal Allstream President, Dean Prevost, delivered a speech on IP Networking and how Canadian businesses can take advantage of their networks to “do more with less.” Not networks as in the ‘wine and cheese party’ type, but as in the ‘hook all your devices up to and collaborate and share type.”
Independent of industry, scale, history, status, or any other descriptor, a business that is going to continue to grow and be successful will need the benefits of a strong network. A secure and stable network for your business will minimize expenses, reduce risk, and stay connected when it matters. Below is the speech in its entirety.
Thank you for that kind introduction. And good morning, everyone.
Let’s start by defining a few terms.
When you hear the word Greece — do you think beautiful islands in the Mediterranean? Or volatility in financial markets?
When you hear Jobs — do you think about employment data? Or the guy who changed everything about computers, music distribution, and mobile communications?
When you hear Cloud — do you think about something over your head with rain in it? Or a new way of storing and backing up the data and applications that your business requires?
I could play this game all day. These words have all acquired new meanings lately. I want to talk about one of the reasons for this. And it relates to one more word which is also acquiring new meanings in today’s economy. The global communications network, or series of interconnected networks that connects your world and mine today. This network today has billions of access points through the smart devices in your pocket. It’s a network changing everything about business.
Let’s define three of those changes a little more forcefully:
1. Interconnectedness in everything 24/7/365.
Someone doesn’t pay their taxes in Athens and someone else is out of a job in Laval. Someone buys a portfolio of mortgage debt in Florida and a hedge fund in London goes bust. More positively; Someone creates a better mousetrap in Brossard, a factory opens in China and a new distribution channel in Toronto. Everything’s connected, completely, whether we like it or not.
2. Every industry is going to have a near-death experience and then be born again as something else.
It’s not just iTunes and iPhones and iPads. Or Blackberries. Every business, every sector, public and private, will experience a radical change in definition because of the network. Is your business ready for that?
3. The network has not just entered the mainstream of business planning and strategy; it’s arguably hijacked it.
It’s not just CIOs and IT people who need to worry about the newer developments in networking like Cloud and Virtualization. You do. Whether you run a big business with thousands of people. Or something much smaller. Your network, or ability to network, and be networked, is at the centre of your business, especially how you serve customers.
I realize it’s easy for me to say all this. At Allstream I run a network company with over 30,000 kilometres of fibre cable and 65,000 customers all across Canada who use our services. Big companies, mid-market, and small business. And here in Quebec, too, we have 10 000 customers, more than 400 employees, and our fibre network crosses the whole territory. And, I’m proud to say we continue to invest in Quebec and for the long term.
Our management team here is led by Edith Cloutier who is here this morning. And Edith, I hope you would agree with me that for Quebec businesses to succeed at home, and in markets globally, they need to put networking at the centre of their strategies. I wonder, though, how you see it?
Let’s do a quick test. When you think of networking and your business? Do you see risks or a threat? Is the glass half-empty? Or do you see rewards; the opportunity? Or is the glass is also half full? The answer is….both.
You have to look at networking as both threat and opportunity. And that’s really what I want to talk about: the paradoxes or the new dynamics that are at the centre of business today. Some of these paradoxes were created by networking, and some can be only be managed through networking.
A few examples of paradoxes we can probably all relate to.
- Apart + Together – wireless/mobility, the Internet, teleworking, globalization, outsourcing, partnering, etc. are stretching companies apart. In opposition, we place a much higher value today on togetherness; on teamwork.
- Fast + Slow – We are all wired to connect at very fast speeds. But with that speed also comes communications overload, a lack of “slow time” to think the erosion of mental space. This creates demand for more choice, control and efficiency in how we are reached or reach others.
- Open + Closed – The Internet has opened up information flow for relationship-building, for new customer touchpoints and different kinds of conversations. There is the opposing priority of being more closed for security threats: identity theft, hacking, protecting your reputation online.
- Simple + Complex – Everyone wants simplicity in everything. You push a button and – boom – the right voice or the right data is right there. We want things to be simple but the technological fact in the background is that it’s complex.
There is another paradox that brings all of this together; the battle cry that every one of us hears at some point. Do more with less.
On some level, this is a very annoying phase. People just say “do more with less” as if it’s as easy as waking up in the morning. But it’s difficult stuff. Like growing your business without hiring more people. Like improving your bottom line while investing in new systems. Like controlling costs while serving customers better.
Doing more with less and all the other paradoxes represent opposing or polarizing forces you can’t easily choose between. It’s not either/or…it’s both. You need to reconcile them not in theory, but in reality. And to my mind, networking, or the network, is a force that can reconcile those challenges we all face today.
Here are some principles that we value, at Allstream, in working with businesses across the country:
1. Institutionalize flexibility
We provide our customers with flexibility in their choices for using networking to strengthen their business. An example: Your call centre, if you have one or need one.
The old way of doing business is to offer, let’s say, 300 or 400 full-time employees an 8-hour shift with 2-hours notice, over a 3-shift day, over a month-long cycle. People come to one big building at the designated time, leave at the designated time. Think of the cost structure built into that model. Think of the lack of flexibility.
Is there a better way? Maybe some people want to work from home and not travel? Or maybe you want some people to work at home; to cut down on your real estate costs. Maybe some people want a 3-hour shift, so you say fine, but you give them 1-hour notice of shift, not two. Maybe you can’t find enough employees in one community or in one time zone – and need to hire people in a different country? Maybe you need three or four smaller contact centres in different areas to meet changing business needs or avail yourself of local economic incentives.
Each of these possibilities, and the alternatives are endless, can be explored if your call centre solution is flexible.
2. Integrate messiness.
We have all been sold the line that today we live in the “plug and play” world for everything we buy. But even the smallest of networks like the little wireless router in your home office isn’t always simple to manage. You realize this when you spend an hour with technical support tweaking the preferences you never knew you had.
Now, look at a mid-market or larger business. Turning on a service for 10/100/1,000/10,000 users. Across geography; big distances. With varying levels of bandwidth at different facilities. With different access for different employee groups. With a new service uniquely customized to your business as reflected by the type/style of traffic it carries. Try extending your unique solution out to a partner in your supply chain. Or even your customers. On a tight deadline.
And try doing all this off the shelf? One button everything’s running. It’s not that easy no matter what people tell you. Networks are, to put it in polite language, heterogeneous entities. They’re messy – very messy. The fact is: a networking service for a large or mid-size company does not usually come off the shelf. It needs to be integrated. I think the related issue is…
3. Managing Complexity
A growing part of our business is what we call Managed Services: where we take away the uglier parts of management complexity in the network from a customer. We just give them the services they need so that they, and their IT people, can sleep at night. Without worrying if their network will go down. So that they can focus on what they do best: their business. The challenge itself is complex when you consider things like:
Cloud — a very hot topic. There are several types of cloud models and connections for moving your data into the cloud, which is a simple way of saying, moving it into someone else’s data centre. It’s not so easy to figure out which model is best for you: a private cloud, a public cloud on the Internet, or some hybrid.
Virtualization — the notion that, just like cloud, you might be better off leasing a networking service rather than buying all the equipment for your own network. To virtualize a capability means spending much less on capital, much less on training your IT people on new systems, and paying a monthly fee for a service.
Software as a service — or what we call “sass” a great term. Everything’s moving to the web, right? All your applications, everything to run your business. Do you have the experience and expertise to do this and not put your business at risk?
Security — and finally, the obligatory warning about security. Cybercrime is entering a much more creative phase of destructiveness. Large companies often have teams of experts to protect their business from hackers. But many mid-market and smaller businesses, which are equally vulnerable, do not have those resources. And that’s a problem.
When I think about these issues, the question I want to pose to everyone in the room is this:
Is your network ready? Ready for things like cloud services, virtualization, and software as a service? Can you keep the hackers out? Because if your network isn’t ready can your business truly be ready for today’s world?
I want to talk readiness from a larger perspective for a minute. The network; it’s a great enabler. I think we can all agree with that. For your business, the network is oxygen: critical for survival. But that network, in Canada, is in danger of being starved of oxygen unless there are changes in the investment climate, and specifically, the rules for who can invest in our industry.
That brings me to a paradox that aligns my interests with yours. We all want to be global players today; as countries, regions, cities, businesses. As individuals. We want to compete, to expand our horizons, and to connect to global opportunity, even if we never leave home and serve the same customers we always have. We want to be big-time.
If that’s the case, then why is the investment climate in the communications sector so un-competitive, shrinking its horizons, and disconnected from global opportunity? Why are we so small-time?
This needs some explaining. It’s no great secret that telecommunications is a very capital intensive business. The Allstream network has more than $2 billion in it. And every year, we keep investing significantly. Remember, a decade ago, businesses were still using dial-up as a viable option for Internet. These days, even a child at home takes high-speed Internet for granted. How did we get here? Massive investment, year after year. But right now with the rules and policies we work with, the newer and more innovative providers have limited access to risk and investment capital to keep evolving our networks for the future.
To put this in simple terms: outside investors and equity partners can’t really come into Canada and participate in our sector, except under very restrictive conditions. Basically, my business can’t take in new partners or investors, not in a sensible way, which forces us out to the international debt markets for money that can be expensive to borrow.
Now in contrast, the established incumbents; the very largest telcos in Canada, all built their networks and their market presence in the monopoly era and often with foreign capital before the current restrictions were imposed. This is not a minor policy issue. This has long-term implications on your business and mine. We need networks that enable innovation, not disable it. We need networks that look ahead, not to the past. To put a very fine point on it: our networks need financial oxygen; they need capital, or we are risking our economic future.
It’s happened before, ten years ago or so more than a dozen competitors in my business, many of them enterprises of serious consequence, went bankrupt. Part of the reason: not enough financial oxygen here. This is a complex issue, but this is how I net things out:
Yes, the Canadian government has taken steps to improve competition, innovation and investment in our industry. They are trying to improve market conditions for companies like Allstream, and for newer competitors, that are not established incumbents and that did not build their networks by what amounted to a subsidy or tax on Canadians for generations. Or through easier access to foreign capital back in the day.
Even so, our government in a policy sense must do much more, faster to make our sector more competitive and innovative if not for my sake, then yours, and Canadian business in general. For decades the monopoly incumbents used every possible argument and device to stop competition and investment from entering Canada, unless it favoured them. At first, they didn’t want competition in any form, saying the Canadian market could not support competition in long distance. Canadian business leaders finally rebelled and competition came in. And that helped companies like Allstream grow.
Then their argument changed. After decades of benefiting from monopoly conditions suddenly, with new competition happening, the incumbents declared that the playing field in all markets must be completely the same.
The same rules must apply to everyone! Fair enough, but not really. The experts in our field mostly say that when markets have been distorted for so long by monopoly control you have to do something to help competition and innovation take root.
The government and its regulatory agency the CRTC are doing more of that in the wireless sector, for example, by ensuring that new startups have a chance to grow without excessive interference from the large incumbents. We need them to go further. We need to remove the restrictions on where companies like ours can find capital to build and evolve networks for the future. We really need to let this industry breathe and grow. And the bottom line is: Your people need to connect for your business to compete and thrive.
And that brings me to some final thoughts. A final paradox to bring everything together. The more we rely on technology in our world – the more we invest in systems and networks – the more it becomes apparent to me that the differentiator isn’t technology at the end of the day.
It’s relationships and how strong they are. It’s people. The more technological and networked we become. The more we need to highlight the value of the human difference. The more things change, the more they stay the same.
Thanks for your time this morning.
So how does your business “do more with less”? Do you use telecommunications to achieve that? We’re excited to hear how!
Image thanks to MaRS Discovery District Vimeo Channel
Share