Challenges and Opportunities

Tuesday, June 17, 2008, Hotel Golf Venera, 14:00 - 15:30

Chair:
Christer Carlsson, Professor & Director
Institute for Advanced Management Systems Research – IAMSR, Åbo Akademi Uni-versity, Finland

Panelists:
Tomi Dahlberg, Professor
Information Systems Science Department, Helsinki School of Economics HSE, Finland
Ilkka Lakaniemi, Head of Global Political Dialogue and Initiatives
Corporate Affairs, Nokia Siemens Networks
Pirkko Walden, Professor
Institute for Advanced Management Systems Research, Department of Information Technologies, Åbo Akademi University, Finland

Panel outline

The work with mobile value service propositions should start from some simple ob-servations, which are at the core of the applications built around the mobile, wireless technology:

• Mobility, mobile phones are brought along as individual tools and instruments, which has changed the everyday routines of communicating significantly
• Availability, mobile phones allow their users to be continuously connected, which has changed the communication infrastructure in significant ways
• Ubiquity, network interconnectivity and roaming agreements allow mobile communication anywhere and at any time
• Value services, mobile technology is a platform for services that expand the limits of the possible in the structure of everyday routines

We will state as a proposal that any mobile value service should show an evolutionary path of development from these four value-building features.
 
The Mobile Service Arena

Smart mobile phones are getting advanced and enhanced features for mobile services with the replacement process of the older generation mobile phones now gaining mo-mentum in both Europe and Asia.

There are not yet any clear ideas on what mobile services will satisfy the Braudel Rule [Freedom becomes value when it expands the limits of the possible in the structure of everyday life routines] but work is under way to gain some understanding – it appears that mobile value services may be a better answer than mobile data services.

There are a number of problems which hamper the progress:

• Markets for mobile technology applications are described in theory; there is no real understanding of what they are in practice
• Common wisdom is quite often anchored in limited market surveys which quite often find very specialised user groups
• The infrastructure  and business models  for mobile services are only being formed and major market actors are moving to establish positions
• Full-scale introductions of mobile services have been mostly trial and error – it appears that the mobile network operators are to be blamed for this

Market foresights have repeatedly been widely off the mark in the last 5-7 years. There is no reliable data available for a systematic and constructive discussion of mo-bile value services. Consumers appear to form their own markets which require quickly adaptive and new forms of business models.

In summary, mobile value services are still an emerging network solution with forma-tive solutions in unformed markets of global, gigantic reach. We still do not fully un-derstand the driving forces, which are going to create commercially viable and user-valued products & services. We still do not have agreed standards for the infrastruc-ture, neither for the support technologies needed to operate the emerging mobile busi-ness nor for the potential users to fully benefit from mobile services

The Mobile Services Challenge

The point missed in creating mobile services appears to be how to create and imple-ment user value; hence we will now focus on mobile value services as a success with them will be a roadmap for both mobile data services and web community services. The road ahead was formulated by Peter Keen in his keynote at the HICSS-38 confer-ence. Peter’s starting points (which are still very valid after 3 years):

• Experts overrate data services as natural driver of demand
• For consumers, flexibility – freedom of location and access – is key (hence the wi-fi explosion)
• “Knowledge ” here is a matter of conversation, not information – part of PCCI (Personal Consumer Communications Industry); chat rooms made AOL, SMS was the unplanned killer app, WAP was a disappointment
• The mobile industry has wasted well over $1 trillion in the search for business models for data services: today, these amount to 2-3% of revenues, with mes-saging 10-15%

Then our proposal and key discussion points will be:

• Mobile value services [MVS] will be part of and an implementation of the value web models
• MVS will be generic, modular designs that will support and be part of web community services
• Mobile value services will implement the Braudel Rule
• MVS will be key drivers in the forming of community services – we will show and discuss a number of solutions developed in the Åland archipelago