Selecting Outsourcing Service Portfolio. Evidence from Russian Mobile Network Operators

<p>Today telecom operators in search of ways to decrease costs and to focus on key operations pay more and more attention to outsourcing their own network infrastructure and its maintenance.</p><p>But while transferring classical outsourcing model into telecommunication industry market players faced some &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; specificity, that hadn&rsquo;t let outsourcing contracts to achieve wanted results. That&rsquo;s way the decision about whether to outsource or not should be very considered and should come from detailed analysis of its pros and cons.</p><p><strong>Goal and tasks of the study</strong></p><p>This paper has the purpose to discover the factors which influence the structure of outsourcing service portfolio of Russian mobile network operators and to design recommendations for composing this portfolio considering industry trends in short-term period (up to 5 years). The tasks of this study are as following:</p><ol><li>To study theoretical basis of outsourcing and its industry specificity;</li><li>To classify outsourcing services in the mobile industry and discover their key characteristics;</li><li>To look through world and Russian trends in the mobile industry;</li><li>To estimate current status and perspectives of world and Russian markets of network outsourcing;</li><li>To discover possible motivation and obstacles for usage of outsourcing by mobile network operators;</li><li>To study the publications and obtain expert views on the questions of usage of outsourcing by mobile network operators;</li><li>To aggregate received data and compose on that basis the outsourcing service portfolio to implement by Russian mobile network operators;</li><li>To design recommendations for changing the outsourcing strategy of network operators in case of different industry scenarios.</li></ol><p style="margin-left:35.45pt;"><strong>Used methodology</strong></p><p>To achieve the expected goal of this paper we used such methods as:</p><ol><li>Analysis of literature for the studied topic;</li><li>Internal surveillance of activities and interworking of outsoursees and outsourcers;</li><li>&nbsp;Analysis of top-management&rsquo;s interviews (both for network operators and outsourcers) from the open sources;</li><li>Carrying out deep interviews with companies employees.</li></ol><p style="margin-left:35.45pt;"><strong>Results</strong></p><p style="margin-left:35.45pt;">We proposed to use expected competitive advantages considering possible future scenarios as the main factor while making decision about outsourcing service portfolio. One of the most likely scenarios shows that data communication would become the main differentiative attribute both for people and companies using mobile services. In such case the control over the network, possibility to configure it in a fast and flexible way, stability and high data throughput in every single geographical point would become of main importance for the mobile network operators. But when using outsourcing of network operations one should consider &nbsp; inherent risks of losing these competitive advantages. Considering this we&rsquo;ve created such a structure of outsourcing service portfolio, by using which mobile network operator would preserve key business processes but still could achieve benefits of outsourcing for peripheral operations.</p>