Telecom Quality

Abstract:

The paper will provide a step-by-step approach on the opportunities that quality management may provide to improve a telecommunications company from a business perspective. It will strive to identify commonality despite great outward differences to other high tech industries. In all these situations, the challenge is to establish a linkage between the situations and derive know-how.

All around the world companies are using the criteria of the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award, the European Quality Award, the Deming Application Prize, and many other national quality awards to assess their current performance against the set of guidelines for total quality of a successful company. The paper will provide tips so that an telecom organization can develop meaningful and realistic action plans for improving service.

Introduction

The so-called “information age” has heralded in tremendous advances in information distribution networks. Closely following the heels of the “jet age,” which brought us affordable transcontinental travel, the growth of various telecommunications networks and technologies has continued to bring distant peoples together, feeding the expansion of spheres of influence, and ultimately making the world smaller. Satellites instantaneously reflect live television broadcasts instantaneously to foreign lands, people can afford to call and chat with relatives almost anywhere in the world, video teleconferences allow business meetings to take place between sites scattered across the globe. Yet telecommunication systems are among the oldest of utilities.

Continuous improvement of such a long-lived system through the ages can be challenging. Legacy technologies turn into excess baggage that hinder the pace of progress. Certain upgrades or growth can be introduced incrementally, but at times require massive overhauls of the deployed system at enormous up-front costs. With such high barriers to change, extraordinary effort must be expended to justify that improvements are worth the investment.

Convergence of information, entertainment, and communications services.

Scope: Information and Communication Technology systems, including telephone, mobile, and packet data networks. Includes hardware, software, and protocol design, in addition to manufacturing and service providers.

Transition & backwards compatibility: an old pulse dialing phone from the 40s (check references) could still patch in to the current phone system and place a call to a state of the art digital mobile phone. Even though this was probably not a requirement then or now, the capability just evolved into being. Brings up question of “transitionable” vs. “dead-end” architectures.

Differs from more traditional high tech manufacturing fields. Much of the product functionality is governed by software, which, like the rest of the software industry, is characterized by low distribution costs but expensive and extremely rapid development and maintenance cycles.

Must operate in a highly regulated environment, answering to government demands for resource allocation, coverage, and resource limits. Additionally must participate (and compete) in standards established by industry consortiums.

Interoperability is key, and can only be achieved by rigorous development of and adherence to technical standard specifications. Protocols that are not widely supported quickly become islands, and eventually become submerged or irrelevant if they aren't bridged with the rest of the population.

How will the next revolution in telecommunications pan out? DRM, decentralized distributed ad-hoc networking, peer 2 peer applications, information / knowledge management infrastructure...

Baldrige Criteria Applied to the High-Tech Telecom Industry

We will use the Baldrige framework as the structure to take analyze the operational performance of a player in the telecommunications market. Quality plays a role in every aspect, from technical means of ensuring low bit error rates, reliability, and high availability to several nines, to customer and market goals of providing quality of service guarantees, incident response, and customer service. For each section, we provide related case studies from the industry that highlight the impact that the Baldrige criteria has on the success of the business.

Organizational Profile

Leadership

Strategic Planning

Customer Focus

Metrics & Performance Monitoring

Human Resources Focus

Processes

Business Results

Rowin Andruscavage

2004-04-13T00:12:11