Tough call that one, but Clive Grinyer from France Telecom seems to think so.

“I work in an organisation that doesn’t understand anything I do, if it does understand it, it thinks it’s about putting the logo on at the end, and that it’s something you do right at the end of the process, when all the really important decisions have all been made, and people come in and say: ‘Hey, we’ve got two weeks left, would you please do the user interface thing? Make it Orange, make it the right font, you know, and then we’ll go.’ I said, you know, you mean a year and two weeks or do you really mean two weeks? And of course, if it’s late, it’s my fault, and the whole thing goes wrong. I give a big talk called Lipstick on a Pig, which is how I feel about that approach to design.”

Here’s an issue plaguing most operators today - no central direction as to what the consumer needs. DoCoMo cracked the code early on by hiring in non-telecoms execs such as Takeshi Natsuno and Mari Matsunaga (from the internet and publishing worlds respectively) to design consumer focused services (hence I-mode). DoCoMo put Matsunaga in charge of service rollout and integrated the marketing and tech departments… so simple it seems yet so far removed from what we need to do globally.

In fact, consumer needs are left to the “marketing department” or the “consumer insights department” whereas they should remain the priority of the CEO as they, after all pay his bonus cheque every year. Only 22% of telecoms executives stated “customer knowledge” as their main priority. Network coverage rated 54%. Fair enough when your main concern is building out a network, but we have gone beyond that in the vast majority of markets out there.

Shame on us… We’re all too busy worrying whether or not we have high profile brands in our portfolio, or we’re chasing Web2.0 widgets around the west coast of the US rather than prioritizing customer service and lifetsyle relevance.