| User Experience: the new paradigm in the service generation |
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Franco Serio, Chief Technology Officer of Italtel S.p.A
Today, also thanks to the fundamental contribution of the book The Long Tail ¹ by Chris Anderson, the engineer can dismiss the unusual role as a half wandering knight and a half alchemist, to recover his status and original mission: to interpret user needs, find the satisfying solutions and manage their complexity. In fact, the Long Tail paradigm has destroyed the myth of the killer application, showing that only the 20% of the business is developed through this kind of applications, while the remaining 80% comes from the other, numerous and more or less simple, applications. With regard to technology and engineering, the key factor is to find out the complexity blocks in the creation of a services offer aligned with the Long Tail business model. First of all, complexity characterizes the Net and the standardization process. In the traditional development of telecommunications services the standard has been the turning point to guarantee service continuity and quality. Nevertheless, this process still requires a long time that is not consistent with the dynamics of web 2.0 services, the current innovation drivers for ICT. In order to describe and understand the service generation process in the web 2.0 era, it is necessary to start from the state of the art. We can better understand the historical importance of the present time through a parallelism with the medicine and, in particular, with the great changeover in research thanks to professor Dulbecco’s Genoma project. In his famous book Scienza e società oggi ² he reminds that the decisive turning point in the research on DNA was to consider the molecular structures of the deoxyribonucleic acid not as chemical elements but as messages of the complex internal system needs.
The acceleration requirement is driven by the Web innovation rhythm. In fact, the time-to-market of a competitive offer must be limited to few days or weeks and not stretched out to months by standardization processes. We have achieved the goal of being independent from standards, in order to guarantee an ever up-to date offer, but, above all, to make the network ready to receive the creative and innovative push of Web 2.0 applications. In fact, with the adoption of web standards and open API, we can complete this kind of applications and generate an offer of 360° carrier grade communication services without further complexity. At the same time, the network evolutionary process goes on towards new standards like the ISM, but we have to consider them as enablers and not as solutions to create new services. In this framework the Net can still be a breeding ground of innovative services through two fundamental elements. The first one is a service layer open to web standards and able to manage both their interoperability and network complexity. The second one is the creation of a universal data layer, which should be accessible from all applications, enabling users to get a series of personalized services and operators to explore new offer paradigms. These last ones should be able to renew the telco business model and set up the basis for new opportunities of revenues growth related to the advertising system. ¹Chris Anderson, The Long Tail (Hyperion, 2006) ²Renato Dulbecco, Scienza e società oggi. La tentazione della paura (ed. Bompiani, 2004) |
The new generation of telecommunications services has been too long driven by the search for the Killer Application, considered by the market and innovation centres as a technological Holy Graal or a philosophers’ stone able to turn every single bit over the Net into gold.
Moving from this example to the present situation we can notice that the greatest turning point is represented by the user role. In fact, users are no longer only consumers, but now they are also active players in the creation of services and providers of knowledge, information, experiences and personal contents over the network.