Staying focused on your customers’ requirements is a variant on the First Commandment of Commerce - ‘Honour Your Sponsor’.  It applies regardless of your organisation’s size, age, past achievements or perceived power.

The CMA’s annual survey of Members’ interests – what they want and expect of the telecoms industry – is much more than a ritual nod just before asking for a subscription renewal.  The CMA survey drives our agenda and keeps us focused on our members’ needs.

The value of the survey is underscored by the spending power of the UK business community.  The minutes may be slipping away but CMA members collectively represent over £13bn per annum in a sector that is undergoing astonishing upheavals.

This year’s survey gave weight to the scale of this change – the readiness to embrace VoIP and the range of supply-side choices that are coming over the horizon.   But CMA members are not some band of happy-clapping geeky evangelists turned on by technovelties.   They have significant responsibilities for their organisations’ performance – regardless of whether they are directly employed or provide outsourced or third-party communications management.

The challenges facing CMA members are very much to do with the management of risk.  Choosing suppliers. Validating technology choices. Understanding alternatives.   Making the business investment case.  Assessing the real costs – not the theory – of business relationships. 

When network and system choices have knock-on implications for your company’s strategic flexibility and performance, you have an interdependence on suppliers that goes far deeper than checking the quarterly bill.

One of the classic oversights on the part of suppliers is to overlook Relationship Costs.  The headline pricing may appear to be highly competitive but from a business customer viewpoint the real costs include the degree of hassle in getting the supplier to understand what is really needed, the process of buying it, making it work and keeping it working.    As CMA members know only too well, these transactional costs, the time, the effort, the expertise and the delays, can often far exceed the underlying base price for the product or service. 

All this is now further complicated by unknown factors – the uncertainties of what might or might not be available come the NGN revolution – and thrown into sharp relief by the apparent shortcomings of what is fashionably called ‘engagement’.    

In much the same way that leading intermediaries and value-added suppliers recently realised that Regulators seemed blissfully unaware of the ‘channel economics’, much the same is beginning to dawn on larger numbers of ordinary business managers who have not previously questioned the wisdom of their primary supplier.

It is entirely understandable that in desperate times, desperate measures are needed.  The scale of the IP revolution is vast.  It’s about much more than technology.   Suppliers must race to ready themselves for an entirely different business model.   They’ll have no future without finding a new one. 

Meanwhile businesses are sizing up new choices and new risks.  Do we need these old relationships?   Do Telco’s really understand our emergent needs?   Do they complacently assume unbroken loyalty?  Are they listening and responding?   Will they be able to change both their technology and their commercial culture? 

Shift happens.  Punters make pay-days possible.

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First published in NetworkingPlus April 2006