By Debbie Fisher, Alcatel-Lucent.

As Marshall McLuhan popularized in his writings from the 1960’s, The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man (1962) and Understanding Media (1964), the world has been transformed by ICT – with instantaneous, ubiquitous access to information.  Change also spilled into social spheres as humans who moved from individualists to a collective identity, formed a new social organization which was called the Global Village.

Yet, what I find most interesting as I reflect on this notion and completion of my study of smart cities and the citizens who live there is the term McLuhan started to use later — the term Global Theater.  What’s the difference between people who are part of Global Village vs. a Global Theater?  It’s simple.  They change from consumer to producer, from acquisition to involvement.

This is the key I’ve highlighted in my global study of 4 smart cities:  Chattanooga TN in the USA, Zurich, Switzerland, King Abdullah Economic City in Saudi Arabia, and Wuxi, China.  Cities around the globe are grappling with social, economic, and environmental challenges.  Also, city leaders, large and small enterprises, and private public partnerships are beginning to address these challenges in a way that respects local cultures and traditions.  But what we heard was that one voice was typically missing:  the voice of the citizen.

And citizens were supportive of joining the Global Theater.  The majority of citizens we interviewed, who numbered more than 100, expressed a strong interest in taking an active role in defining how to make their cities smarter.  Formal focus groups, informal neighborhood meetings, regional planning teams, and even contests where citizens can launch new business ideas or applications leveraging new ICT capabilities are just a few of “theatrics” we uncovered.

Successful providers have already found rewards by taking a more active role in involving citizens in smart city development.  Increased customer satisfaction and retention as well as winning new customers away from longstanding competitors are just two benefits which are affecting the bottom line.  Research found that these benefits can be applied globally.  Citizens shared common views on new services that would make their daily lives better – shorter queues, remote healthcare and education, virtual entertainment, and lower energy costs are just a few of the services highlighted in our ebook (free subscription required).

So take a few minutes to see what role you can play in the Global Theater.  You’re sure to find a part that’s right for you.

By Ajay Pande, Director of Customer Experience Solutions Marketing, Alcatel-Lucent.

Customer satisfaction is vital for a mobile operator’s reputation as well as its profits. Happy customers make for good business especially when one support call has the potential to wipe out all profit from that subscriber for a month, eroding already razor thin margins.  And if that customer is unhappy with the experience and turns to social networking, the damage to the brand can be even more far-reaching.

As more people use their smartphones, tablets and other mobile devices to stream video, play games, and shop, customer care becomes an even hotter topic. With a proliferation of connected mobile devices using different operating systems– and its expected that by 2015 there will be 2.5 billion smartphone connections alone – together with a seemingly endless combination of apps – the margin for user, device and network error rises dramatically as does the potential number of customer care calls and even further revenue erosion.

Calling a helpdesk can be a frustrating task – figures show that 21%[1] of helpdesk calls take an hour to resolve – and that just isn’t good enough from a customer perspective.  Today’s customer care agents don’t have a unified view of the network, device and application. They have to trawl through 40-50 screens across different systems to get to the bottom of an issue – but knowing that doesn’t limit the customer’s frustration.

Figures show that 89%[2] of those who switch carriers do so because of a bad customer experience. Even harsher, a study by WDS found a 1.6 increased likelihood for churn following one customer care call. So how do mobile service providers – faced with a growing number of customer calls – improve that experience?  One approach is removing the need to call the helpdesk at all.

By focusing on proactive care – solving an issue before it affects a subscriber – a mobile service provider can go a long way to making this scenario a reality.  Proactive care uses network analytics – information taken from the end-to-end monitoring of the network, the subscriber’s mobile device and the apps running on top of it – and analyzes the relationship between the three elements to identify potential outages and errors and proactively solve them. For example: sending an automatic system update to subscribers because they have downloaded a rogue app known to impact device performance before subscribers notice a degradation of service. Figures show that when issues are proactively resolved, 87%[3] of customers are less likely to leave for another carrier.

Alcatel-Lucent’s Motive ServiceView for Mobile solution provides proactive network monitoring and system health checks to trigger automatic corrective actions and resolve issues related to apps, systems and settings. It also allows mobile service providers to offer a subscriber app for self diagnosis and remediation. Use of the solution can dramatically cut the number of calls to a helpdesk.

Learn more about this solution in this interview with Cassidy Shield, VP Marketing, Platforms activity, Alcatel-Lucent

Click here to view the embedded video.

It won’t cut all the calls – but ServiceView makes the process smoother and quicker for customers who do need to contact the helpdesk. A unique user interface (UI) allows customer care agents to walk through a workflow, pulling together an end-to-end view of the analytics taken from the network, device and apps in real time. The workflows and templates can be tailored based on call feedback to make it easier to answer future calls.

The UI also supplies an overall view of all the accounts the customer subscribes to – personal, business, shared, or all three.  This allows the customer care agent to see if an issue will affect another account and solve that at the same time.  And they can also decide to flag the customer to schedule an aftercare customer service call.

Motive ServiceView for Mobile may not completely remove the need for customer service agents but it will reduce the number of customer calls. The combination of a more simplified interface for helpdesk staff, self-care tools and proactive monitoring helps mobile service providers save the costs and frustration associated with lengthy helpdesk calls.  By raising customer satisfaction and reducing churn, they are in a better position to take advantage of rising revenue generated by customers in an increasingly mobile world.

[1] Source: Bell Labs analysis

[2] Harris Interactive, 2011

[3] Bell Labs analysis, Coleman Parks Global Consumer Survey

By Marco Malfavon, Americas Communications, Alcatel-Lucent.

Being uprooted from their countries and having to deal with a unknown and a lot of times hostile environment is just the beginning of the struggle that many kids and young adults face as they become part of the ever growing flow of migrants looking for new life opportunities. In Barcelona, Spain, hundreds if not thousands of disadvantaged youngsters who should be attending school or working in stable jobs, are left with minimal opportunities due to their difficult socioeconomic conditions.

The Fundacion Adsis, with the support of Alcatel-Lucent, is working to help these disadvantaged youngsters go back to and stay in school, or acquire the basic skills to look for a viable job.  Since the launch of the “Youth with Future” program, close to 150 boys and girls have participated in group workshops and individual or tutoring sessions. For those participants who have not completed secondary studies, the focus is ensuring that they reinsert themselves in the educational system. Those searching for a job start with an individual assessment to determine their interests, motivation, and skills. The program includes computer training, skills development, job search techniques, interview workshops and others. The training is complemented by a series of group activities to foster self-esteem and social interactions.

The results are very encouraging and the majority of participants have developed basic, technical or other skills to improve their job opportunities. But probably the most important outcome is how this program is providing disadvantage youngsters with a sense of purpose and renewed motivation. As a member of the Alcatel-Lucent Board of Trustees, it makes me feel very proud to see that our company is contributing to help a group of young adults become active and productive members of society.

For more information about the project and Fundacion Adsis visit this dedicated site.

Follow the Alcatel-Lucent Foundation on Facebook.

By Xavier Martin, VP Corporate Marketing, Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise.

Last month, Alcatel-Lucent’s Enterprise activity hosted its annual global industry analyst conference. We welcomed more than 30 analysts to Annapolis, Maryland to spend a day and a half with us. We also invited a few of our partners and four of our key customers who qualified for the fifth annual Alcatel-Lucent Dynamic Enterprise Awards program. To read more details about what went on at the analyst event, please take a look at our Storify. For this post, I wanted to profile our customers. We were honored to have four customers from across the globe join us at our industry analyst conference, which has served as the platform for recognizing our Dynamic Enterprise customers over the past five years.

This year’s customers were recognized in four categories. Each finalist presented their solution implementation to the more than 30 analysts who attended. The overall winner was selected by vote based on the following criteria:

• Innovation
• Vision
• Contribution to organizational transformation

The following is a list of the four customers along with the categories that describe why they were considered to be a Dynamic Enterprise:

• Bayonette (Norway) received praise in the category of Technology – Data Center Transformation. Bayonette, a cloud service provider, is building a new infrastructure and will be going against providers of Internet services, site-to-site office connectivity, storage and cloud-based application delivery to deliver solutions to SMB customers across their region. They are first to build this type of offer for an entire city area in Norway. Arve Paalsrud, the CTO at Bayonette, details their cloud service, Hydra, in this video.
• Fox Chapel Area School District (USA) was honored for Transformation – Models for Transformation with a shift to ‘As a Service’ offers. What is exciting about Fox Chapel Area is this K-12 school district embraced new technology through the cloud! They moved their hardware off-premise with a hosted solution offered by our channel partner, Advance2000, and in doing so their solution is yielding many benefits:
  - They implement Unified Communications to foster improved district / parent-teacher / parent communications.
  - They were able to leverage government subsidy funding for a new telephony environment.
  -  The district deploys mobile tablet computing, flexible online course options, and open platform computing to take education well into the future.
  With this new approach, Fox Chapel Area is able to build and deliver new learning anytime and anyplace. The Coordinator of Educational Technology, Scott Hand, and the students of Fox Chapel Area made this video to explain more.

• Sagestamo (Portugal) was recognized in the category of New Communications Usages, which highlights innovative organizations where new mobility and multimedia capabilities are enabling the delivery of new services for their end-users. Sagestamo brings a unique offer to the market as they are a Portugal government-owned real estate agency that manages buildings.  With Alcatel-Lucent solutions, they are expanding their services to become a communications service provider to their tenants. Our OpenTouch and OpenTouch Conversation solution for iPad, help them to deliver innovative business communications services with a focus on mobility.

And then there was the OVERALL winner!

• California State University (USA) was voted the overall Dynamic Enterprise winner by the analysts for their efforts in the category of Technology – Campus Networking. The California State University system serves over 420,000 students annually – it’s the largest higher education system in North America. What made CSU stand out was the process they took to transform their state-wide network. Take note, because this is a GAME CHANGER! It began as a vision CSU had: They wanted to approach the RFP process from a Vendor Agnostic perspective to equitably compare the best solutions currently available on the market. Next, they conducted an extensive total cost of ownership (TCO) based comparison of all proposals — so they were looking at the long-term cost of owning the solutions, not just the purchase price. The outcome?  With this implementation, CSU will create the foundation to support a campus and system-wide teaching evolution, ensuring the students are ready to excel in their careers and achieve their academic goals. Oh, and they are demonstrating fiduciary responsibility by investing for the long term, with the California taxpayer as the beneficiary.

Being a Dynamic Enterprise means a world of opportunity for employees, customers, and the business. It means you’ve chosen to leverage solutions to implement advanced technologies, transforming your business in innovative ways that allow you to keep a competitive edge while delivering exceptional customer service.  Being a Dynamic Enterprise shows effort, acknowledgement and pride.

Wi-Fi® is hot right now and there’s no mistake that telecom operators are aggressively looking to make it a key component of their offerings.

Operators are turning their attention to Wi-Fi technologies for both a competitive advantage and revenue generation as part of their mobile broadband strategies. They are contemplating community Wi-Fi, venue coverage and extended hotspot strategies — each of which has unique business implications — to meet objectives. By integrating Wi-Fi with their cellular network, mobile and converged operators can provide subscribers with secure and trusted connectivity across Wi-Fi hotspots and cellular networks for a seamless mobile broadband experience.

This is such a hot topic that Light Reading has asked me to participate in a Webinar moderated by Heavy Reading’s Gabriel Brown on May 14th at 12 noon ET.

The Carrier Wi-Fi opportunity

Wi-Fi is already part of our everyday life, and its use continues to rise. There are very few new devices coming to the market that do not feature integrated Wi-Fi. According to the Wireless Broadband Alliance, figures for 2011 put the total number of Wi-Fi hotspots worldwide at 1.3 million. That number is forecast to grow 350% to 5.8 million by 2015. The fact that 70% of consumers are in Wi-Fi coverage more than 70% of the time during the day shows the great potential of Wi-Fi.

Click to enlarge

However Carrier Wi-Fi is not Enterprise Wi-Fi (learn more by going to our Carrier Wi-Fi information center).

To fully reap the benefits of Carrier Wi-Fi, operators will have to deploy a high-performance carrier grade platform that is scalable and designed to support the demands of the multiple Wi-Fi sources from which subscribers are accessing the network.

Carrier Wi-Fi has moved from a convenient option to an integral component of operator’s mobile broadband strategies.

Globally we are seeing fixed, Mobile and Converged operators investigating, planning and now deploying Carrier Wi-Fi solutions. They are moving quickly to take advantage of Carrier Wi-Fi within their overall mobile broadband strategy to keep their customers connected to their favorite services such as social networking, web browsing, shopping, payTV or online video.

Click to enlarge

It is apparent that to address the range of Carrier Wi-Fi market applications, Wi-Fi access infrastructure from a range of vendors will be required to meet operators’ business and application requirements. Operators are also aware that they need a common Carrier Wi-Fi core infrastructure to support these market applications. This drives new requirements and focus around key elements such as the WLAN gateway. Operator strategies combined with ongoing Wi-Fi usage, demand carrier grade infrastructure and systems to deliver a simple, secure, seamless user experience.

The way Carrier Wi-Fi will be utilized will depend on the operator’s business priorities.   For example, cable operators (MSOs) are leading the way with Carrier Wi-Fi as a competitive strategy versus Mobile operators who are looking at it to improve their overall customer experience.

Want to learn more then join me at the Light Reading Webinar.

By Teresa Mastrangelo, Principal Analyst, Broadbandtrends (follow her on Twitter).

Over the past month, broadbandtrends has been talking with numerous operators regarding their plans for next-generation broadband.  While FTTH is clearly a long-term goal for most operators, there remains an economic reality to its deployment.  As such, we are seeing accelerating interest in the deployment of VDSL2 Vectoring.  Based on responses to a recently conducted global operator survey on VDSL2 Vectoring deployment strategies – 60 percent of those responding are currently deploying or in trial with VDSL2 Vectoring.

With over 400 million DSL subscribers across the globe, there is an extensive embedded base of copper lines that operators have the potential to leverage to provide FTTH-like speeds over copper.

As such, a large majority of operators are choosing to implement FTTN/C/B networks in combination with VDSL2 Vectoring and copper-pair bonding to leverage their copper plant to offer new, enhanced and significantly faster broadband services.

Although they won’t be able to match Gigabit speeds offered by some operators – VDSL2 Vectoring will easily provide speeds of 75-100Mbps at significantly less cost than FTTH.

Let’s be clear.  VDSL2 Vectoring is not a substitution for FTTH.  And in many cases, operators are deploying VDSL2 Vectoring in combination with FTTH or as a precursor to FTTH by driving fiber deeper into the network for the eventual migration to FTTH.

Click to enlarge

The key advantage of VDSL2 Vectoring is its ability to be rapidly deployed and meet the time-to-market challenges brought about not only by National Broadband Plans and/or Digital Agenda targets, but also the competitive environment.  According to our survey, the #1 reason operators are deploying VDSL2 Vectoring is to offer faster speeds.

Although VDSL2 Vectoring provides some challenges – most notably related to legacy CPE (the #1 challenged cited by operators) – solutions are available from vendors that can help with the planning and migration of legacy DSL lines into vectored DSL lines.

Given recent announcements by Tier 1 operators such as AT&T, Deutsche Telekom, Swisscom, and Belgacom – to name just a very few – momentum is clearly building for VDSL2 Vectoring.  And even though the earliest activity has been focused on Europe – we have found deployment and trial activity present in all regions – with Alcatel-Lucent taking a leading role based on  the breadth and depth of its VDSL2 Vectoring solution and in both live deployments and trial activity.

Click to enlarge

We see great potential for VDSL2 Vectoring and have forecasted strong growth – with 27 percent of all cumulative VDSL2 ports expected to be vectored by 2017, with EMEA representing the largest opportunity, but North America having the highest penetration of VDSL2 Vectoring at 42 percent of total VDSL ports.

VDSL2 Vectoring is not the end-game.  But it offers  operators  a solution that can address the immediate time-to-market, competitive and regulatory challenges; while allowing operators to prepare their networks for the eventual migration to FTTH.

We are often asked to quantify how subscriber network usage differs from 3G to 4G/LTE. In the next few Analytics Beat blog posts, we will use information from our 9900 Wireless Network Guardian to compare volume, application usage, signaling, and devices across these two technologies in North America.

Besides the obvious gain in speed from 3G to 4G LTE – on average LTE networks are 7 times faster  –   the most noticeable difference is volume.  Our data shows that on average, an LTE user consumes 46  MB per day, more than doubling the consumption of a 3G user at 17 MB per day (almost a 168% increase).  We initially thought this swell in volume would coincide with a corresponding increase in signaling (the number of radio connection setups) and airtime (the time spent holding the radio connection) too.   However, as our team of network forensics experts has found many times, the results are not always necessarily straightforward.  Our studies uncovered that while volume increased, airtime only increased by 26%, and signaling posted a mere 13% increase.

In this post, we focus our attention on understanding differences in application popularity and the contributors to the volume difference.  Here are our findings:

Contributors to volume difference

For this analysis, applications were grouped into categories such as video, social networking and mixed content sharing.  The results show that LTE users surpassed 3G users in volume for each category.  Not suprisingly, video generates by far the most volume per user of all applications on the Internet. More significantly, users of video applications eat up almost 50% more volume on 4G/LTE than on 3G, eating up 21 MB of the 33 MB daily usage generated by LTE users (an average of 640 MB per user each month on video alone!).  The dominant contributor to volume increase in LTE networks has been identified:  it is video. Furthermore, ranking applications by daily volume share instead of popularity, about half of the top 10 applications in LTE networks are for video.

Although generating less data volume than video, both  social networking applications and mixed content sharing applications are also more popular with LTE users; their per user volume outstrips their 3G counterparts by 32% and 136% respectively.  This more than doubling of mixed content sharing brings its volume almost at par with social network applications, driven by Peer to Peer traffic which is making a significant comeback on LTE.

Mobile application volume per user per day - in MB *

Application popularity

Mobile application popularity - 3G & 4G (click to enlarge)

Ranking the applications by popularity (i.e. percentage of subscribers use an application), we notice no notable difference in the top 10 applications across 3G and LTE technologies.  Some applications differ by a rank or two, but the same applications are found on both lists.  Remarkably, only half of the top applications are explicitly initiated by users.  The other half are not consumer recognizable brands since they operate in the background: Doubleclick and Google analytics for ads, Akamai for content distribution, NTP service to update user location and ScoreCardResearch to supply data for Internet studies.

There is, however, a significant application adoption rate difference that explains some of the volume variance.  The percentage of LTE subscribers reaching the top applications is 18% higher on average than 3G users.  The highest penetration gain was achieved by location services, expanding their reach by 24% to command almost half of all users.  Next, Google and Internet browsing improved their adoption, now being used by more than 80% of users on the newest technology networks.  And YouTube’s popularity climbed by 20% on LTE networks; this is significant given the bandwidth hungry nature of this application.

So what does this all mean?  Early 4G/LTE adopters tend to be more technology savvy, and have use fully-featured LTE smartphones with 4G/LTE speeds at their fingertips.  They begin to use mobile data in much the same way they use broadband delivered over fixed networks or Wi-Fi.  People love video and love to share and download other content such as audio or photos – faster content upload/download and uninterrupted videos make them forget they are on a mobile network, leading them to use their mobile service more and more for all their application needs.  And this is just the beginning:  the increasing popularity of all applications combined with each user consuming more data for each application results in a multiplicative effect on bandwidth.  Clearly service providers have to ensure sufficient capacity and for service providers flat-rate data plans will be difficult to sustain.  We think over the course of the next year we will see a variety of plan types including — softcaps, shared plans and other innovative service plans — as subscribers start to enjoy the fast speed of  4G/LTE.

The next post will further examine the impact of video specifically on LTE networks  and discuss innovative ways for operators to put less strain the networks while offering new services that will be exciting for their customers.

* Category description:

• Video:  includes all video-centric traffic like Netflix, YouTube and Face Time.
• Mixed content:  includes peer-to-peer (P2P) file-sharing traffic such as BitTorrent, Cloud-based services such as iCloud or Dropbox and other similar storage and sharing applications.
• Social Networking:  includes Facebook, Google Plus, Twitter and other similar social applications.

Click here to subscribe to our Analytics Beat e-mail newsletter for  the latest latest trends, data and behaviors affecting today’s advanced mobile communications networks.

Our Analytics Beat studies examine a representative cross-section of mobile data customers using the 9900 Wireless Network Guardian and are made possible by the voluntary participation of our customers. Collectively, these customers provide mobile service to millions of subscribers worldwide.

The ancestor of Youtube

By Simon Poulter, head of media relations, Alcatel-Lucent (follow him on Twitter: @simonpoulter)

In 1996, while working in the consumer electronics industry, I had the pleasure of presenting to journalists the very first flat television set that a consumer could actually go out and buy (assuming, of course, that they had the 1996 equivalent of 16,000 euros to spare).

What made that set so remarkable wasn’t just the plasma technology that allowed it to be just 10cm thick (which, 17 years ago, was the thinnest TV ever), but that for the first time in the history of television it wouldn’t have to sit in the corner of the living room.

For 70 years, the location of the household TV set had been largely constrained by ergonomics. These large wooden boxes containing a heavy glass tube and associated electronics could only, really, go in the corner. The advent of the plasma set, however, meant that television could not only be freed from the living room corner, but freed from the living room altogether – and hung on any wall like a painting.

Today, LCD and LED TVs hang on walls everywhere. Commoditization has brought their price down to the extent that they now exist in multiple rooms in multiple houses. However, we can also access on-demand content on a multitude of screens and devices, at home and on the move, and are no longer bound by the programming schedules of broadcasters. Indeed, television ownership may even have peaked: two years ago the US TV ratings agency Nielsen reported a 3% decline in American households owning television sets, a small but significant drop and due in part to consumers using laptops, tablets and smartphones to consume television content.

Television – once, something you watched on a TV set, which arrived via a rooftop aerial, satellite dish or cable connection, and with programming schedules determined by broadcasters – has become a true multimedia medium. Today, you are increasingly likely to watch television content via a broadband Internet provider as any of the means that have sustained television since the mid-1920s.

Netflix, for example, recently gave a first-run debut to an entire new drama series, House Of Cards starring Kevin Spacey – exclusively online, releasing episodes in batches at a time. In a previous  time, “straight to video” was a negative term, but Netflix believe that people today consume programming differently: it is well known that people will spend a weekend watching an entire season of a popular show via a Blu-ray Disc or DVD box set, or by downloading from an online retailer.

One company that should be credited for preparing the way for this new television environment is YouTube. Since its launch, eight years ago, YouTube has continuously challenged conventional wisdom about what television, in the Internet age, really is. Today, the self-styled “video-sharing” site reaches more than a billion users each month, or “nearly one out of every two people on the Internet”.

When it launched, YouTube could hardly be regarded as a serious competitor to network television, unless your idea of TV entertainment involved piano-playing cats and “hilarious” clips of people falling over at weddings. But today, as – like all Silicon Valley startups – it looks to monetize what began as just a good idea, it offers dedicated specialist interest channels, full-length movies and content agreements with the world’s biggest television producers and studios.

Of course, its audience will include those sitting in their living rooms, watching on a TV set, but it will also include business travelers on planes and trains accessing content on their tablets, and teenagers watching on their games devices. Significantly, a quarter of all YouTube viewing today comes from mobile devices – something in the region of a billion views every day.

If you factor in other mobile video services and applications, like the BBC’s iPlayer, as well as timeshift services like TiVo (incredibly now 13 years old), and it would be fair to say that television has shed more than one skin over the last decade or two.

There is, however, a downside to the proliferation of new viewing platforms like smartphones, tablets and games consoles: the data networks serving these devices are rapidly becoming stretched.

According to research by Alcatel-Lucent’s Bell Labs, by 2020, American consumers will be accessing as much as seven hours of video every day, an increase of more than two hours compared to today. That’s not to suggest that Americans will be spending seven hours a day sitting around watching TV  – 70% of all daily video consumption will be accounted for by on-demand services (today it is just a third), but also, video will become a significantly bigger part of our overall communication experience. Imagine, then, how such a forecast for the United States might replicate around the world.

‘Triple-play’ services – the provision of video, data and voice communications all in one package – are fuelling this expansion. Much, though, also lies in the evolution of online content itself. For example, the Bell Labs study noted increasing prevalence of video in services that were previously low-bandwidth – more video clips on news sites and social networks like Facebook and Twitter adding video messaging features for smartphones and tablets.

But as television becomes more personalized in the tablet age, delivering high-quality, high-definition video to these individual devices is placing disproportionate pressure on the ‘IP edge’ of networks, that part of the network where most of the intelligence is needed to deliver ever more sophisticated content. And it’s a pressure that will only increase as, according to Bell Labs, online video consumption rises twelvefold per year to an eye-watering 1,000 billion gigabytes by 2020.

“High quality online video services represent an exciting new revenue opportunity for communications service providers,” comments Marcus Weldon, the Chief Technology Officer of Alcatel-Lucent. However, he warns that operators need to be prepared to take advantage of cloud-based delivery to mitigate some of the bandwidth challenges that this growth in video traffic will create.

“Left unmanaged, the traffic growth traffic could turn into a deluge and spell disaster. It is important to look at where service providers’ investments can have the most impact,” Weldon adds. “This research by Bell Labs makes clear that the IP edge of both wireline and wireless networks – which are increasingly becoming one and the same – offers the greatest opportunity to improve network performance.”

Of course, this is just a warning. But it does place into fascinating context just how television, a medium that changed relatively little in its first few decades, has undergone so many radical changes during the last few decades – from the advent of color television to the launch of multi-channel satellite broadcasting, the first flat TV sets to the birth of the tablet generation.  The question now is will the infrastructure be allowed to evolve accordingly?

Is your organisation ready for a social intranet? Studies show that social often fails: A recent report from Gartner found that 80% of all social business efforts will not achieve the intended benefits. How to make sure that you are part of the 20% ?

I recently spoke with Marc Jadoul, Marketing Director at Alcatel-Lucent and advocate for the company’s social intranet called ‘Engage’, about the benefits of a social platform – and how to reap them.

Knowledge workers in a high-tech company

Social intranets are especially relevant for organisations that rely heavily on knowledge workers, such as consulting firms and high-tech companies. In a previous blog post, I wrote about how a social intranet can unlock the tacit knowledge that sits in the brains of the employees. Alcatel-Lucent is a typical example of an organisation that is experiencing the benefits from going social:

• A workforce consisting mainly of highly skilled engineers and technical sales people
• A complex, multi-national organisation
• Active in a highly competitive market where innovation and speed of execution are key

According to Laurie Buczek of Intel, knowledge workers spend up to 30% of their working day looking for people and information. A waste of precious time and human resources that may be dramatically reduced by providing employees with appropriate communication tools, putting collaboration and knowledge sharing on the foreplan. This is exactly what Engage aims to do.

Knowledge is power, but community is strength

Alcatel-Lucent’s Jive-based platform is providing a user-friendly environment that empowers over 70,000 employees worldwide to connect and collaborate with each other, and to contribute to over 4,000 work and non-work related communities.

The screenshot below shows the home page of Engage (that can be further customised and personalised by each individual user). It illustrates the approach taken: a rich combination of various types of content, ranging from traditional news stories to blogs, group discussions, unanswered questions and tag clouds to help users find topics and communities of interest to them.

Alcatel-Lucent’s implementation focuses strongly on internal communities and the value that they bring. “It’s all about growing cross-organisational knowledge that we can apply in our day-to-day business” says Marc. “Communities will help to break down organisational silos, put people in touch with like-minded colleagues and provide the opportunity to learn and innovate.”

A light governance model, based on a code of conduct and the principle of self-regulation, has proven its value – only on very rare occasions does the community manager need to step in. It must be noted however that – although a light governance has proven to be the right path towards rapid and smooth adoption – a new collaboration model like the one empowered by Engage can only succeed in an open-minded organisation, in which people, teams and leadership are willing and motivated to transform.

Measuring real value

The hardest part of any social intranet project is to demonstrate the ROI. Earlier this year I wrote about the case of Omron and how their intranet delivers value to the business.

To understand the ROI of platforms such as Engage, it’s important to understand the costs of conducting business without these tools, including the missed opportunities of not using them. At Alcatel-Lucent the approach has been to demonstrate success by collecting both quantitative and qualitative feedback from employees and business stakeholders. Some examples:

• “We saved 450 minutes/week in project status conference calls”
• “We got better answers to questions in 30 minutes instead of hours”
• “I have been working 11 years with this company now and because of Engage, I feel more connected with my colleagues now”

Sometimes even non-business related communities on Engage led to unexpected cost-savings. As an example, pictures taken by employees and shared in the community of interest on photography were reused in marketing materials, instead of paying for professional stock photos.

“Another KPI to take into account is the positive effect on company culture, corporate image and employee retention,” says Marc Jadoul. “Recent research by Alcatel-Lucent has shown that in highly successful companies management, IT and HR work together to equip workers with productivity tools that enable a ‘New Way of Working.’”

Intranet is a journey, not a destination

What’s the next challenge for the intranet of Alcatel-Lucent? More integration comes to mind: currently Engage co-exists with a traditional, managed intranet for official communication and with a SharePoint platform for team collaboration. This is a typical phase in the evolution of many organisations’ intranets and matches with Jane McConnell’s model for intranet maturity.

“Today there is only basic cross-linking between the 3 environments,” says Marc. “The next step on our journey is to create a more integrated digital workplace, where employees are presented with a single user experience.”

In 2011, the Alcatel-Lucent Foundation partnered with World Education to start our Global Signature Program – ConnectEd. The idea behind this program was to be able to provide help to participants who are mainly young adults and are striving to enter the “world of work”. Also given our technology leadership and expertise, it was decided that digitization of education and tools will be a focal point in this program. Today we have completed 2 successful years in this program, have provided digital training to 12,513 youth, 60% of them girls!

As we start working on our 3^rd year, I took sometime to talk to World Education Program Director for ConnectEd, Estelle Day, to understand how this program is helping the participants, what has been challenging and what has been successful.

What were the influencing factors in determining the form and structure of ConnectEd?

World Education has been working for 60 years in over 40 countries. Over those many years we have learnt what types of education interventions are most effective in helping vulnerable youth get ahead and break down the cycles of disadvantage surrounding them.

As we set about designing the program back in 2010, we knew that our education programs in ConnectEd needed to be linked to increased equity, livelihoods, safe behaviors and greater engagement with a broader world.  We were aware that completion of basic education is essential for improving the life outcomes of disadvantaged youth, whether they are in-school or out-of-school. And we knew that to keep these youth in school or in nonformal education programs we would have to address barriers such as prohibitive direct costs of education for poor families; low perceived relevance of curriculum, especially relating to employment and improved livelihoods; and limited value placed on education, especially for girls.

We also knew, though, that successful interventions are not about educational access and curricula alone. They are about teachers, parents, communities, volunteers and government, and most importantly, they are about the youth themselves.

In terms of countries – the Foundation gave us a list of countries to choose from, and we picked those where we knew we could have most impact, where we already had working experience and partnerships, where we could reach the most vulnerable and where the need was greatest.  In the end, the program portfolio put in place under ConnectEd across the various countries encompassed a full range of evidence-based interventions that had demonstrated results.

What do you think is the most important change that ConnectEd brings to the participants lives?

It often strikes me that across all the different contexts that ConnectEd works in, and all the different types and backgrounds of youth, one of the most commonly cited changes brought by the program is self-confidence. With this self-confidence then comes motivation and self-belief by the youth that they can achieve better things. At World Ed we refer to this a lot, we call it self-efficacy – it’s a mixture of having the belief that you can do something, as well as having the skills to do it.

I believe this common thread of self-confidence that I see across all the various ConnectEd sites is due to the way the interventions are run. Whether it be training in mechanics, computer classes, taking part in a youth group or after-school tutoring, youth everywhere in ConnectEd are surrounded by caring adults who believe in them, who help them gain a better self-awareness, who build on their strengths and who listen to them.

What has been the most amazing transformation you have witnessed in a participant so far?

I haven’t worked on the front-line, interacting daily with youth and educators, for a long time now, , but the videos and case-studies the teams send in show some amazing examples of change. There was a young orphan in Indonesia who used to live on the street who is now studying, has learnt practical skills in baking and in multi media which he is using to earn an income, and he is now planning to go on to further studies. There was a young woman in Cambodia who in the past had gone illegally to work in Thailand and been a victim of labor abuse. Now she is literate, numerate and has her own business in her home village. I could go on and on. The stories come pouring in from China, Australia, Brazil, India, all telling of young individuals who had dropped out from school and lost hope and direction, who have now gained qualifications, found jobs or gone back to school.  For each of these young people, the transformation of their future life chances is profound.

How does ConnectEd change lives?

I can answer that in one word: process. By that I mean, it is the way that teachers teach, not what they teach that is important. As I said before, one of the biggest determining factors in our choice of local implementing partners for ConnectEd was a shared philosophy. Common to all of us implementing ConnectEd is the belief that helping disadvantaged youth secure decent work and get ahead, is not just about teaching specific technical work skills or about getting these youth through school. It’s about helping these youth to develop skills like decision-making, problem solving, communication skills, team work, planning, self-confidence, self-awareness, and leadership. It sounds easy, doesn’t it? It’s not.  If you dig down below the surface of what all the ConnectEd teams do every day, you’ll find an awful lot of teacher training and adjusting of curricula, of on-the-job mentoring and support given by our trained staff to teachers and facilitators to ensure that our ConnectEd classes and activities are properly fostering all of these skills, that ConnectEd at ground level really does ‘walk the talk’.

What is the role of the Alcatel-Lucent volunteers? What is the impact they can have?

So far, around 1,000 staff from Alcatel-Lucent have volunteered with ConnectEd, directly benefiting at least 3,300 youth. They’ve been doing a whole range of activities, from clothing donations to training teachers in ICT, to helping youth get jobs by doing interview simulations. They’ve been helping to facilitate workshops on financial literacy and careers development, giving tutorials in difficult subjects like English, and in a number of the ConnectEd countries, youth have visited Alcatel-Lucent offices to get an inside look at the world of work.

I truly believe that the opportunity we have under ConnectEd to get Alcatel-Lucent volunteers involved has the potential to really strengthen the impact of the program. The majority of the youth we work with, most especially the girls, really don’t have role models in their daily lives that can inspire them to take a different path in life, to open their eyes to other possibilities.

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