At O2 Business’s second annual Blue Door conference, private and public sector business leaders gathered to hear about the opportunities and challenges they face in an increasingly connected world – including the rollout of 5G. Here’s what the experts said about how to survive this new wave of transformational technology:
1 Get connected, get smart – embrace the Internet of Things (IoT)
By 2025, millions if not billions of devices across the UK will be connected through the 5G network. This expanding influence of the IoT promises to transform business and society.
Imagine being able to monitor every piece of machinery in your business, down to its single components. This changes the way you do maintenance, enabling you to anticipate faults and order in new parts before a breakdown has even happened, saving precious production time. In agriculture, embedding a network of sensors in the soil can help to detect when irrigation is needed, allowing farmers to use water more resourcefully. The examples are endless.
The conference brought together private and public sector business leaders
2 Use technology as a means to an end
While companies should be thinking about how they can use the IoT, digitisation can’t be about technology for technology’s sake. O2’s chief information officer, Debra Bailey, told delegates that she has always been focused on business outcomes rather than the technology itself.
Azfar Aslam, senior partner at Nokia Bell Labs, told delegates that the technology investment decision should start with the problem you are trying to solve as a business, rather than the various potential use cases supported by a particular technology.
That’s very much the approach that Northumbrian Water Group took when it started to explore, with the help of O2, how it might embrace 5G technology. Martin Jackson, the utility’s head of IT service and operations, told delegates: “We have to answer the ‘So what?’ We have to understand as a business what 5G can enable and how that can impact some of the challenges we face, but the conversations don’t naturally start with the technology – they start with some of the outcomes we want to achieve in the business.”
3 You don’t have to invent the innovation – just be ready for it
Uber didn’t invent taxis. Apple didn’t invent the computer or the mobile phone. And Google certainly didn’t invent the search engine. They took an existing innovation – and made it better. So the pressure to innovate can be made more manageable if you think of it in terms of just being ready for it, as opposed to always needing to invent the innovation.
If you want to know where denial can land you, just take a look at what happened to the music industry, which panicked when music filesharing site Napster appeared on the scene. Music labels, fearing that they would lose control of how their product got to market, went to war with Napster. Digital music has survived regardless and is now the most common way we buy and listen to music.
Gareth Turpin, sales director at O2, in conversation with Mark Evans, CEO
4 Look for your competitors where you least expect them
The decline of the traditional music industry has another telling lesson. Your competitors might not be who you think they are. Apple built computers. Then in 2003, it launched its iTunes Store and by 2014 it had sold 35bn songs.
As Gareth Turpin, sales director at O2, pointed out when talking about customer expectations: “It isn’t just our direct competitors that set our customers’ expectations. They don’t just look at our My O2 app and ask if it’s as good as other operators’. You get compared to every organisation they interact with. Our app might get compared to the Monzo app and customers will be asking, ‘Why can’t my phone company do what my bank does?’”
5 Mine your big data
If you want to know how to improve your customers’ experience, start mining your big data to understand why they make the decisions they do.
But to use big data successfully, you need to create a data culture with a strong governance model, the technology architecture to allow you to scale up as more data comes in, and teams with the right skills, including data scientists, data translators and data engineers.
“You also need to democratise data access,” Carlos Martinez Miguel, global director of big data and artificial intelligence business for O2 parent Telefónica, told delegates. “Ensure people have the data they need to provide customers with the right service.”
Carlos Martinez Miguel, global director of big data and artificial intelligence, Telefónica
6 Don’t stand still
“Over the years, the one constant has been change,” O2’s Bailey told delegates, so how ever you choose to face the future, one thing is key – don’t stand still.
“Test and trial, learn and fail fast, and move on,” said Brendan O’Reilly, O2’s chief technology officer. “What we give to our customers has to be robust but the process of getting there has to be really fast.”
O2’s Turpin agreed, warning businesses that there is no single silver bullet to future-proofing yourself. “Other organisations are constantly innovating,” he said. “To keep up, you have to stay relevant. Keep learning, evolving and innovating. Focus on the people who deliver the customer experience for you and never ever stop engaging them.”
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