Orange Business on Posterous

Philippe Dumont, IT&S (IT Services)

IT&S also went for an offshoring model. 2005 was the date when they decided to go fr offshoring to reduce costs but also to do more for our clents: gain additional capacity to cover for increasing complexity of IT applications.

IT is doing things differently from what CS&O (Customer Service and Operations) because it is also outsoucing a lot. All vendor contracts had to be moved to new suppliers, therefore reducing the number of suppliers. "re-vendoring" they called it and achieved significnt savings (mainly working in india).

Lessons learned

- technical challenges are nothing compared to people issues
- difficulties to hire appropriate skills
- knwledge transfer and staff retention so as to let them train the newly hired people. It wasn't just solved with bonuses. It was very much about transparency and the involvement of staff in the project very early
- moving from a latin/anglo-saxon to latin/indian cultural configuration

Cultural dimensions
- typical trap IT companies fall into is applying the same organisational models and practices (IT&S used Hofstede's model based on 5 dimensions)

Tips

- adapt organisation
- different expectatipons according to countries
- retaining IT skills is a priority
- culturl change also impacts vendors

Resource
- http://geert-hofstede.com

Orange Business Live 2009 - London
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The Orange Business Services Offshoring experience

Presented by Damian Pender, CS&O London
Challenges Orange faced and why it went for offshoring and lessons learned
- 2005: a number of new challenges with Internet services, new competitors etc.
- consolidatin of service centres to provide better service
- 24x7 service required
- Itil methodology had to be rolled out (Iso accreditation in 2008 achieved)
- why an in-house offshore model? The infrastructure was in place and was a real asset. Otherwise, outsourcing would have been a better solution. Low business risk and operational control in place. Numbers were quite clear. Operational volumes were quite stable. If volumes had been more volatile, outsourcing would have been a better route. Achieved greater cost savings
- where are we today? 4500+ people WW 2700 in France. 4 major service centres (Rio, Cairo and Delhi and a new one in Mauritius). 3 support units in France in addition to that. Reduced implementation cycles. Local presence was retained through 5 key regions. 165 countries with local presence, hence good balance between regional and global presence.
- What were the key success factors?
1.Strong sponsorship by management supporting Damian throughout the implementation of the new model. 2.Communication aspect was regular: regular communication has to happen even though you may not always have something important to say but it's important you be in touch with eachother.
3.good relationship with local governements and good links with multilingual educational systems both in English and French. Very strong relationship. Careful reviews of CV's and checking skills, not just language skills.
4. Operating process wasn't changed at the same time

Lessons learned
- expect some resistance and some impact on customer satisfaction results
- strictly control the release in high cost areas
- massive hiring is resource-intensive and requires local and strong management locally
- space issues will happen due to the fact that teams will be growing
- be aware of cultural challenges (will be detailed in a later presentation)

This project was a success, we have an ITIL model on top now and the benefits are huge





Orange Business Live 2009 - London
#orangelive09

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Lessons_learned_from_a_Global_.zip (1143 KB)

Bruno Riou from checkpoint is being interviewed by Stewart and Joel. The video recording will be posted at http://orange-business.tv

Orange Business Live 2009 - London
#orangelive09

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Preparing an interview with Ipanema's T Mesmer

Forrester expert Mike Cansfield is being interviewed by Stewart Baines from the Orange Business Live Blog.
 
Will be posted at http://orange-business.tv as soon as it's been edited.

JP Vanot is former CIO of Orange. His take about innovatipn is that innovation has to become customer-centric. He talked at the London Orange Business Live conference remotely, from the comfort of the Paris telepresence room.

1. Ip networks pervasive. Massive increase in machines connected to IP networks. Even in-car equipment soon to be all connected to IP (IPV6)
2. Web factor: Web2.0 allows consumers to become producers. They could be part of your ecosystems.
3. Another disruption is that devices are becoming intelligent.
4. High potential of pervasive networking will trigger challenges to bandwith and network management

4 key questions/challenges we're facing:
1. How to manage identification, authentication. One customer can have multiple entities. One by social network he's part of. Consumers are also employees. Hence many identities have to be recognised. Location-based services also a major challenge
2. Integration of applications from various third party providers and open source is the real challenge. Not developement anymore. Opening api's is also a real challenge.
3. How do you combine intelligent networks and traffic optimisation. Content delivery networks and cloud computing are the things that Orange is moving to. The real challenge is how to match IT and telecoms
4. One of the most interesting challenges is how to design a simpe emotional, intuitive user-interfaces. Consumers have liked iphones (enabled them to use phones intuitively) and Wii (home gaming platform brought ease of use in gaming which made it possible to broaden the market and user-base). Orange is working a lot on interface evaluation

These are the 4 main challenges that Orange is facing and tackling at the moment. This is how Orange believes that it can grow despite the crisis.

Orange Business Live 2009 - London
#orangelive09

> http://blogs.orange-business.com
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Click here to download:

09062009.mp4 (21252 KB)

Here's a very short video of the Opening credits of Orange Business Live 09, it's mp4 format.

#orangelive09

Here are a couple of pics of the masses of kit at the back of the conference room and the room itself, they are a bit dark but you should be able to see there's a lot of kit there.

     

Click here to download:

Orange_Business_Live_Conferenc.zip (307 KB)

A picture taken on the spot at Orange Business Live during Mike Cansfield's presentation summed up in the previous post.

Orange Business Live 2009 - London
#orangelive09

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In his introductory pitch to the Orange Business Live event, Forrester consultant Mike Cansfield analysed the current crisis, compared it to the 1929 depression, and concluded that this was a recession. For companies to get over the current crisis and survive, ICT (the reconfiguration and merger of IT and telecommunications) can actually help companies achieve better results and emerge from the crisis.

Here's some bullet points taken from Forrester's presentation about surviving challenging times.
- from oil crisis to financial crisis to widespread contagion
- but ... This is a recession, not a depression (yet he added though)
- conclusions: noone can ignore the recession. ICT - the fusion of telecommunications and IT - can help companies weather the crisis though.

- The boundary between what was IT and what was telecommunications has blurred. Now the real issue is how we plan our way out of this recession.

- internally and externally: what we learnt from the dotcom crash is that all costs are controllable. Audio and video conferencing are ways of avoiding travel costs. Managing mobile bills is also critical. They have become the major part of the spend. Ecosystems and partners: you need partners to extend your current customer base. Cloud computing: the cloud is the network. E-bonding, proactive custmer service, are all ways of improving the situation in the short term for businesses.

- m2m is also a major trend according to Forrester.

- example no. 1: innovative business model for a car rental in the US using contactless wireless cards to grant access to cars in car-sharing mode.
- example no. 2: in government

A few of Forrester's recommendations for companies in the recession:
- partners
- ICT to generate more efficiency in business
- processes (don't start with technology)
- make sure you hold to your staff

As a conclusion, "the glass is more half full than empty"
There are always winners and losers in a recession but those who will survive are those who are the fittest and the leanest.


Orange Business Live 2009 - London
#orangelive09

> http://blogs.orange-business.com
> http://twitter.com/orangebusiness