My goal for this week is to study Chapter 2 and apply what I learn to analyze the current situation of my company.
My company develops data radios and communication systems for railroad industry, but we are not in the radio business. Rather, we are in telecommunications business. To ensure continued growth for the company, it should therefore concentrate on meeting telecommunications needs. This is well captured in the company’s vision, which is to be the technology leader in providing innovative telecommunication solutions to the transportation industry.
A good mission statement should be market/consumer focused. It drives the company to focus on satisfying customer needs, which is the key to business success. The mission statements of Southwest airlines and Target, for instance, are examples of good mission statements. They are consumer focused and specific enough to give direction to the organization. A mission statement that is product based focused, on the other hand, would make the company focus on selling products rather than meeting customer needs. Focusing on products, the company could easily miss certain threats and opportunity, and eventually put itself at risk of obsolescence.
For my company, the mission statement focuses on satisfying railroad customers. My company is owned by railroads and our owners are also customers. So it concentrates on a narrow market – the railroad industry. Our mission is to successfully deliver and support an open standards-based, interoperable train communication system to all railroad companies. The mission is more than a plague on the wall. It is the driver of the company culture. Once the mission is set, strategies are defined and cascaded downward through the organization.
What we deliver to the railroad customers are data radios and engineering solutions for the train communication system. But the railroad customers do not actually buy radios. What they buy is the ability to exchange data between applications operating on trains and their corporate network. Considering ourselves in the telecommunications business, we can see that our competitors are not only radio development companies, but also other telecommunications business such as cellular, satellite, and fiber optics communications.
Following SWOT analysis in Chapter 2, strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats of my organization are created as follows.
Strengths • As a joint venture, we are uniquely positioned to deliver results; we have access to business and technical resources • Strong technical resources and capabilities • Company proprietary data communication technology has demonstrated that we can meet customer requirements | Weaknesses • Lack of organization capacity and management expertise • Expanded scope revealed skills gaps • Current business processes and systems are not adequate for anticipated growth |
Opportunities • Customer interest in new products • Expanded engineering services, including systems integration and operations • Expanded markets and revenue streams | Threats • Railroad adoption of incompatible technologies • Vendor adoption of incompatible products • Other high tech companies recruiting key contributors or potential candidates |
An example of change in the external environment that affects telecommunication industry is the change in FCC (Federal Communications Commission) regulations. Radio operators in US must receive approval and licensing from the FCC before they can operate. Ownership of a radio operator license can create a barrier to entry for competitors. There is also a limited amount of spectrum that is suitable for data communications. A change in FCC regulations could have a positive or negative impact to the industry.
For example, the FCC narrowbanding mandate affects all operators of land mobile radios that use the spectrum between 150-174 MHz and 421-512 MHz (see http://transition.fcc.gov/pshs/public-safety-spectrum/narrowbanding.html for detail). The FCC narrowbanding mandate requires that the operators move from the traditional 25 kHz channels to 12.5 kHz narrowband channels by January 2013. It creates a threat to the existing operators that could risk losing their existing FCC authorization. The mandate also creates an opportunity to radio development companies to produce new products that operate in the required narrowband channels.
Another example is when the FCC opened up the unused spectrum in the television band, the so-called TV white spaces, to unlicensed wireless devices (see http://www.fcc.gov/blog/fcc-announces-public-testing-first-television-white-spaces-database for detail). This creates a huge opportunity to the telecommunications industry in developing new technologies that utilize the TV white spaces.
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