VUCA Challenges: The Business of Telecom in India
Any Business can be analysed and studied with several perspectives. One of the interesting ways is to apply a framework that looks futuristic, insightful and still inconclusive but progressive to make one think broadly in a given wide perspective. It takes us into vortex thinking; What is possible? What is feasible? What is desirable? While undertaking studies of Businesses, it is often appreciated that there are several uncertainties. There is an initial condition uncertainty, the scenario uncertainty and the structural uncertainty. We are living in a world, which is volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous (VUCA) and black swan events, such as pandemic of COVID-19, have transformed the world. The earlier so-called black swan events changed world history and its trajectory. In 1914 World War- I was a result of a shootout in Sarajevo, then came up the September 11, 2001 attack on world trade tower; 2008 Lehman Brothers bankruptcy was another crisis; 2010 witnessed the Gulf of Mexico oil spill and 2011 saw the Japanese Tsunami. The recent COVID-19 pandemic is another VUCA situation everywhere and in all the Businesses.
Indian Telecom Business
Welcome to the digital world controlled by the telecom industry, the spine, as we call it. How far rapid automation and the new norm will concert together in fractals, but it is clear that all of us should be ready for a shape shifting society, a virtual one, majorly controlled and intertwined, digitally. The telecom sector is the most emerging one, widening employment as well as wealth creation. The journey of the telecom sector from a wireline to wireless, from 1G to 5G (Future of Telecom) and so on has been very dynamic. This sector will also impact and align with future industries and vice versa. As we are moving towards digitization, demand for high speed internet, increase in speedy communications is expected to rapidly replace our demand and this is only possible through 5G and technologies beyond for accelerating growth. India became the second largest market for mobile phones across the world after replacing Vietnam. By 2022, it is expected that there will be an investment of Rs 44,265 Cr in the smartphone phone manufacturing sector in India.
Telecom Business accelerated growth after the expansion of existing 2G networks to 4G or 5G, which rolled out services to select GHz band as well in broadband wireless access (BWA). This growth is now driven by shifting focus on data consumption and also increases importance on rural connectivity. Additionally, fibre-to-the-home market is also growing. The TSPs have started targeting the educational institutions and the retail sector through connectivity solutions such as cloud computing and Wi-Fi. Despite this, the telecom Business is undergoing several challenges in terms of operational and deployment changes. Temporarily, infrastructure and tower providers associations are looking for provisions in terms of high lending limits at lower interest rates, but this decision is still awaited.
With increasing number of COVID-19 cases in India, the government has urged its citizens to stay at home and adopt practice of social distancing. The telecom Business is getting benefited, as people are consuming more data during the lockdown period. This is expected to boost data usage by 10–15% through home broadband and mobile data in India. The on-line education by thousands of Universities, Colleges and Schools has further added more and more data consumption. Though there is substantial gain in revenue of Telecom Companies, yet there is VUCA situation posing a challenge of meeting sudden demand of uninterrupted connectivity with high speed.
Analysis of VUCA Scenario in the Indian Telecom Business
In the above backdrop, it is pertinent to mention that each Business, big or small, faces VUCA conditions one day or other. Telecom Business is no exception. It has faced several VUCA conditions; it is facing in present time and likely to face in future also. Is this Industry VUCA Ready? The answer to this question needs to be explored because future of Telecom Business largely depends on this answer. In the following write-up an attempt has been made to describe and analyse the VUCA scenario in the context of Telecom Business.
The term VUCA was introduced by the US Army at the time of the end of World War II. Volatility being the rate of change, uncertainty implying a lack in predictability, complexity extending to the variety of choices with chaos and ambiguity implying the potential to misread a situation. The VUCA components are not new but the new world has improved them. VUCA is both situational and dynamic; sometimes it seems to be very clear and at other time it shifts because of adjacencies, disruptions and outliers. For futurists, VUCA extends: volatility translates to vision, uncertainty to understanding, complexity to clarity and ambiguity to agility and that one can turn chaos into opportunities.
This analysis though inclusive may help some of the Telecom Firms to be VUCA ready in the following areas:
Volatility
Regularity authorities
Individuals stock
Market
Budget
Cut throat competition
Uncertainty
Market
Consumers behaviour
GDP growth
Complexity
Infrastructure
Network provisioning
Network operations
Services delivered
Ambiguity
Future applications
Consumer expectations
Next generations
New routes to innovation
Public policy or political decisions
The telecom market is a highly dynamic market. The telecom Businesses experiences some threats to stakeholders and volatility in bull markets. The government policies are ambiguous with a high risk for tolerance. The VUCA world demands for creativity and calculated risk to reduce ambiguity and uncertainty.
Challenges before the Indian Telecom Business
Over the last three decades, the Indian telecom Business has witnessed unprecedented changes. The most important changes are technological innovations and regulatory reforms. But with changes come challenges. Five important challenges having VUCA conditions are:
Adopting the latest Technology
Availability of Content
The Security Threats
Tough Competition from OTT
5G technology
Mitigating VUCA Challenges
A Key Survival Factor for the Indian Telecom Business is to ‘fail fast and learn fast’. There is a need to explore and adapt generic solutions to mitigate VUCA challenges. To move-up in the prevailing conditions, the Telecom Business must learn to mitigate VUCA challenges by staying competitive. Strong and successful leadership is requited to mitigate VUCA challenges. In this context, the following leading actions are required:
• Anticipating at the same time responding with speed
• Decisively responding with certainty.
• Navigating carefully the complexity and chaos
• Maintaining effectiveness throwing surprises with lack of being predictable.
Creating and managing Anticipatory Organization is very helpful in dealing with present VUCA challenges before Indian Telecom Sector. The model of Anticipatory Organisation proposed by the Centre for VUCA Studies (CVS) appears to be holistic and pragmatic. This model describes the anticipatory organisation with foresight-feedback-insight mechanism with cohorts of strategy-organisational learning and leadership, intertwined with each. The business environment is like a whirlwind engulfing the business. The vision, understanding, clarity and agility emerge as anchors of an anticipatory organisation. The interplay of leadership, learning and strategy provides energy or sustenance to the anchors. These become a solid framework for the anticipatory organisation.
Road Ahead
With progression in society, things have started evolving on a daily basis across the world that cannot be possible without technological changes. With this, the machine, man and production have corroborated in starting an independent and intelligent network. Thus, “Industry 4.0” came into existence, showing how smart digital services are networked and can communicate with semi-finished products, raw materials, machines, products, tools, robots and men. For development of business, future industries characterize themselves as more flexible and efficient. For example, in a networked factory men and robots will have equal sharing with use of artificial intelligence to build relation to an earlier generation of robots. Extreme changes in business models will take place with digitalization. Production will become more and more flexible with continuous innovations in this sector. Software and hardware solutions on a real time data are the two factors that will help in reaching the goal of digitalization.
(With inputs from Suhayl Abidi and Shivani Singh)
