{"id":13,"date":"2008-03-19T08:48:11","date_gmt":"2008-03-19T08:48:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/meeseeks:5080\/blog\/2008\/03\/porous-boundaries\/"},"modified":"2024-02-19T22:21:08","modified_gmt":"2024-02-19T22:21:08","slug":"porous-boundaries","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/2008\/03\/porous-boundaries\/","title":{"rendered":"Porous boundaries"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Over at This Blog Sits At<\/a>, Grant McCracken has an interesting discussion<\/a>\u00a0about the new corporation. \u00a0\u00a0 One of the features he identified is porousness<\/em>, the idea that boundaries between an organization and its environment are fuzzy and in flux.\u00a0 This has long been the case in telecommunications services, whose very business is connecting people.\u00a0 So it is perhaps not surprising that telcos have been porous places for some time.<\/p>\n

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For British Telecom (BT), Britain’s largest fixed network operator, Vodafone, Britain’s largest mobile operator, was both a major competitor (when BT owned mobile network Cellnet\/ O2) and a major customer (because calls from Vodafone’s\u00a0customers connected across BT’s network, and for this access Vodafone paid BT).\u00a0 At the same time, BT’s customers, both fixed and mobile, called Vodafone’s mobile customers, so BT was also a major customer of Vodafone. \u00a0At one time, each company was the largest customer of the other. \u00a0<\/p>\n

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This makes something of a mockery of traditional linear supply-chain analysis.\u00a0 How do you manage a relationship with a company that is simultaneously a major competitor, a major supplier,\u00a0and a major customer?\u00a0 With kid gloves and internal Chinese Walls, presumably.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 You may even decide to leave one market, as BT did\u00a0by demerging O2, in order to simplify the relationship.<\/p>\n

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Because most telecommunications markets were once regulated monopolies,\u00a0most still have a\u00a0major incumbent (as BT is in Britain).\u00a0\u00a0 This\u00a0fact often makes governments and telecoms regulators tip the scales in favour of new entrants, in order to redress the inherited monopoly.\u00a0\u00a0 A common procedure is to allow new entrants to co-locate their switching equipment right alongside that of the incumbent — even, in some cases, inside the same buildings.\u00a0\u00a0 How many companies, other than telcos, could tolerate competitors having dedicated space and equipment inside their own buildings?<\/p>\n

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And it\u00a0gets even more complex.\u00a0 As I commented on Grant’s\u00a0post,\u00a0 major users of telecoms services, such as American Express,\u00a0often want direct access to the switches of their telecommunications services supplier so as to facilitate rapid reconfiguration of their service profiles.\u00a0 Large telcos, such as Verizon, will often allow such access to their major customers.\u00a0 But then companies such as AmEx, not being phone companies, often do not have the skilled staff to execute such reconfigs. So, Verizon lends AmEx some personnel, and a Verizon employee is sent on longterm secondment to work for AmEx; he or she may be paid by AmEx and report to a boss at AmEx, while retaining a\u00a0career and benefits at Verizon,\u00a0and physically sitting still in a Verizon building. Where do his or her loyalties lie?<\/p>\n

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Porousness indeed.<\/p>\n

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Over at This Blog Sits At, Grant McCracken has an interesting discussion\u00a0about the new corporation. \u00a0\u00a0 One of the features he identified is porousness, the idea that boundaries between an organization and its environment are fuzzy and in flux.\u00a0 This has long been the case in telecommunications services, whose very business is connecting people.\u00a0 So […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[19,78],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-13","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-corporate-culture","category-telecommunications","p1","y2008","m03","d19","h08"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12181,"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13\/revisions\/12181"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}