Outlook Point of View, December 2008
Andy Zimmerman is the global managing director of Accenture Communications.
The communications and technology world in which most of us grew up was one where explosive innovation ruled—often at the expense of ease of use, interoperability and a quality customer experience. Moving from one wireless provider to another? Sorry, your phone won't work now. Bought a new video player and want to connect it to your home network? Sorry, it's not compatible. For the most part, consumers just had to cope with the situation because they had few alternatives. But that world is coming to an end.
Recent Accenture research points to a more consumer-centric path companies must take to high performance as the numbers and types of devices attached to networks rapidly expands. We call this industry trend "trivergence": the coordination of three components—devices, data and controls—over a ubiquitous network. Our research shows a clear need in this trivergent world for a common platform that facilitates the interoperability of services and devices. The days of consumers simply accepting the inevitable incompatibility of components are over. Everything needs to work together, with minimal effort.
Consumers also are beginning to understand that easier, more effective management of all these devices is possible. Using what Accenture calls a "soft panel"—a Web-based capability similar to how Apple iTunes enables the management of audio and video files from a single screen—consumers will be able to control one or many devices simple and effectively. This is an important trend. There's going to be hard demand for this soft panel.
No particular type of company—carrier, high-tech firm, software provider or electronics retailer—begins necessarily from a dominant position when it comes to creating a common platform and making integrated soft panels possible. But all such companies should be positioning themselves now for this converged, customer-centric future.
KISS and Sell
The "KISS" philosophy of success ("Keep It Simple, Stupid") will be a differentiator in driving sales and high performance in the trivergent world. Features and functions used to be key to winning the hearts and minds of consumers. No more. Now it's also about a high-quality, simplified user experience.
The importance of delivering such a user experience was underscored by a global Accenture consumer survey recently conducted with early adopters of technology devices and services—a group we term "tech forwards." The consumers in our study recognize the need for a common platform and for the capabilities provided by that platform—especially in delivering a user experience that is simultaneously richer and easier.
These consumers are already juggling multiple devices: mobile phones, computers, digital cameras and so forth. Most expect the number of networked devices in the world to grow dramatically (as does the technology industry—David Clark, senior research scientist at MIT and one of the chief architects of the Internet, suggests that a network of one trillion devices is not inconceivable). Given this vision of the future, interoperability and simplicity are vital to a company seeking high performance.
Putting the "Plug" in "Plug and Play"
The idea of attaching an electrical device to a power source and having it work immediately is not exactly a new idea. About a century ago, as the industrial revolution was gaining momentum, difficulties in jacking into the power grid were widespread. To get power, one had to hardwire a device to a line.
Then an inventor named Harvey Hubbell had an idea: why not create a product with all the wires permanently attached, with the right polarity and in the right sequence? Hubbell's "separable plug" (or, as we know it, the electrical outlet) dramatically improved safety and also served as the enabler for thousands of consumer devices.
Today's digital world is much more complicated than the one Hubbell knew, because bits are more complex than electrons. Every electron is the same, while every bit is specific to the content, device and user. The modern version of the household wall socket must take all this into account. That means there has to be a platform capable of dealing with the complexity of bits in the simplest, most unobtrusive manner possible.
Although this platform has not been fully designed yet, it would include some form of consumer controls interface—the soft panel—that empowers users to manage their devices, services and identities.
What Consumers Want
The technical details of a common digital platform are beyond most consumers. However, the tech forwards in our study had some preliminary opinions about how this platform should work. We presented the tech-forward consumers in our study with three options for exercising control over their networked devices: managing all devices from a single website or soft panel; equipping a device with an associated widget that can be embedded in a website; or registering each device at its own website.
The highest percentage of consumers (49 percent) favored an integrated, single website or soft panel. The widget approach was favored by 32 percent. Only 19 percent favored separate websites. These results seem logical. Consider a home management environment, for example. Certainly, it would be preferable to log onto a single service and a common menu, from which you could choose to control your dishwasher, microwave, coffee maker and so forth. The alternative—a separate website established by the maker of each individual device or appliance (as Apple provides for an iPod)—seems less tenable in the long run.
And that leads us to the million-dollar¬—or, in this case, the billion- or trillion-dollar—question: how is this common platform going to be achieved and managed? Two scenarios are most likely. In one, a single vendor assumes responsibility for making everything work together. In the second scenario, interoperability of the common platform is achieved through open standards.
In the case of our research, a winner emerged. Fifty-three percent of our consumers favored the single-vendor approach, while 34 percent favored standards-based achievement of interoperability.
Winning the Race
The need to provide seamless delivery across platforms was also an insight from interviews conducted as part of our research—12 in-depth, hour-long telephone discussions with US executives from carriers, software providers and media/content companies.
From these interviews, we found that the communications, media and technology industries in general need interfacing technologies to work as transparently as possible from the standpoint of consumers and business customers. The future world depicted by several of the interviewees is one in which consumers will expect to maintain their phone connections on the move: walking out of a building and into a car, let us say, or moving from home to school or from school to job. Similarly, consumers will want access to information or portals wherever they are, free of the constraints of any particular device, whether it be a desktop computer, television, phone or one of the potentially trillion other networked devices.
The interviews also revealed that too few companies have developed a set of well-formed implications about the growing plethora of networked devices. Concerns seem to be more tactically focused at this stage: Will more bandwidth be required? Will more databases be needed? There is some recognition that greater network intelligence will be required for routing, billing and utilization of bandwidth.
No particular type of company has a competitive advantage yet in the race toward a plug-and-play world, but our research points to several keys to success—such as offering a simple yet rich customer experience, and providing premium customer support.
One conclusion is clear: a growing number of consumers in both developed and developing nations don't need to be convinced about the importance of a networked world. They are ready for it, and they have very high expectations. They want things to work together, and they are looking to the communications, media and technology industries to make the platform interoperable, so consumers can use devices and services easily and seamlessly. Companies that want to sustain high performance in the long term need to move quickly to meet these expectations.
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