The recent news about AT&T users experiencing throttling could be the beginning of where things are headed for mobile data costs. BGR ran a follow up article, AT&T on data throttling: Blame yourselves soon after which characterizes AT&T’s stance and provides an insight as to just how bad things are. In essence, the carriers, or in this case AT&T, don’t really have an answer for what will happen when there’s more data demand than supply. And make no mistake about it, we will get there sooner than you might think.

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This post is primarily for leadership positions.  So much focus goes into designing the current solution, that few think about what will happen at the end of the term.  It is common that a “ramp up” provision is in place for bringing services in, but not so common that there is a “ramp down” provision for when services are being moved off.  Obviously it is not in your provider’s best interest to make it easy for you to move away from their solutions.  One of my clients recently commented on this regarding cloud based services – how easy it is to move services to the cloud but not so easy to move them back.  I’ll have a separate post in the near future on pitfalls to avoid with cloud based services, but regardless of the type of services or solution you are buying, there is a possibility that in a few years there will be a better solution available.

This is one where your IT and Sourcing people need to work together.  It will be important for your IT people to try to anticipate what it will take to “deconstruct”  the solution and implement an alternative.  Your sourcing people will need to make sure that this is factored in.  The danger is that no one gets a pat on the back for avoiding a problem 3-5 years in the future.  And 3-5 years in the future most of the people working on the current solution will be gone.  Leadership can make sure that this has been factored in, and most importantly documented.