The "Static Value Chain" is dead......long live the "Dynamic Value Network"

We had an excellent Team Action Week in Cascais, Portugal last week.  It's always a pleasure to be able to spend a week immersing oneself in the business and technical challenges of the industry, in the company of the best minds in the industry.  Over 200 of our TM Forum members turned up to debate, discuss and network with each other in over 40 different business & technical meetings, that covered all of the hot industry topics that absorb us today.  We had meetings discussing the traditional areas of competence of the TM Forum such as Information modelling and Business Process modelling.  But we also had meetings on topics such as device management and managing content within the broader communications environment. 

As ever, I never leave Team Action Week without an epiphany of some sort, and last week was no exception. Just when I think I understand our rapidly changing industry, I get thrown a curve ball.  For example last week Microsoft were at TM Forum Team Action Week in strength, and when I casually asked what they were hoping to get out of the event they told me that they were hoping to learn how Microsoft as a Service Provider could make use of the TM Forum work. I suppose I shouldn't be surprised that the industry value chain has changed to such an extent that Microsoft can in one breath be a mammoth software company and in the next breath be a service provider. 

This is simply a graphic illustration of the fact that the days of the static value chain are over and we are well and truely in the era of the dynamic value network.  This is a world where the players in the value chain engage in a complicated two-step, continually assessing and reassessing who their suppliers and customers should be in any given service context.  Serious companies have to adjust to the fact that they will occupy six different positions in the value chain before breakfast.

And of course in order to survive in such a dynamic world you need flexible, well understood management systems.  Management systems that can be reconfigured rapidly (or even automatically against clearly defined policies), and which don't come loaded with presumptions about how the industry operates and where your company sits in the value network.  The only thing I'm sure about at this stage about our industry, is that there are many more surprises waiting for us.