My last post about this report was before it became available. See it here: Aberdeen – Quick Fixes This is a must read for anyone who gives damn about knowing how to really manage telecom costs. I do have some issues with the report in general, but would strongly recommend that you at least skim it.  Start with the Executive Summary, especially the bottom section Required Actions – some pretty solid advice. Chapter Three goes into more detail on this. I would also ignore the labels of Best In Class, Laggards, and Industry Average. Good advice helps all companies.

Ok. Here is my first issue: Numbers often obscure the greater truth. In Table 3 on page 10 there are some interesting stats, although I interpret their significance a bit differently. Despite the highlighted successes of the Best In Class categories, if you look at the overall numbers, people have been pretty lazy or ignorant or both in managing telecom costs. For example: only 46.5% of all respondents say there is a corporate strategy for long-term cost management. Really?

Only 63% of executives support reduction of enterprise telecom costs; that’s about buy in and focus. Of course telecom is such a small part of the overall budget, so why bother? Just remember this the next time you purchase a million dollar home with no concern about the decimal points on the interest rate. ‘7.5 vs 8.2%? Oh, that doesn’t seem like alot.’

How about the issue of cost cutting as potentially impacting performance? If your mindset is that you’d be trading away reliability while getting better pricing, well, you’re doing it wrong. Of course if you don’t do your homework on potential bidders then you have no one to blame but yourself.  In fact, your objective should be both lower cost and better performance through developing a productive vendor relationship and strong processes to ensure success.

The last issue can be found on page 5 in Figure 1 where companies would attempt to control consumption as a means to cut cost. If you limit your users in their use of technology, unless they are texting their votes into American Idol, you are looking at the wrong things. Here’s where Best In Class really shows it knows how to run things a bit better. The lesser advanced companies were 4 times as likely to look at this as a means to reduce cost. If you’re in this camp I suggest you rethink this. With policies in place for recommended use of company assets, you’d be only reducing productivity.

Again, what I’m taking issue with is not the report, but what’s in it and what people have reported as their behaviors. I welcome any comments on this.