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| Monday, 30 June 2008 | |
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One of those occurrences that may be important but is probably just another S-FP.
Industry associations... god bless them. But what happens when these ultra-earnest, norm-setting, globe-trotting industrial fraternities (they are rarely sororities) are overtaken by events? Well, a name change may help. Hence ‘The DSL Forum’ has now become ‘The Broadband Forum’. So is this an example of S-FP (self-fulfilling prophesy) for an industry talkshop bent on aggrandisement or an LBR (limp and belated response) to industry change. A land grab, or a bottom burp? Name that tune What’s in a name? Not much, you’d reckon. Yet trade bodies and companies that find the landscape around them changing are faced with two choices when it comes to a response. The first is to hold fast against the change. Many newspapers, for instance, still bear names like ‘Telegraph’ or ‘Courier’ long after such appellations have become anachronistic or irrelevant. They are betting that longevity of association is stronger than chasing or reflecting the latest fad. The other response is to bite hard and re-invent. In this corporate world, this tends to be a lengthy and expensive rebranding exercise. This probably explains why companies with matter-of-fact identities come back with nebulous, surreal of downright daft ones; in theory, this spares them the time and expense of changing the brand over and again in a rapidly-shifting world. Taking the latter option carries with it a tacit admission that the world has changed in unforeseen ways and implies a ‘lack of visibility’. This last phrase, coined by tech CEOs when they dug themselves so deep into an early and over-exuberant grave during the dot.com madness, actually translates as ‘we didn’t see it coming’. Seeing is believing That’s not a great attribute in a soi-disant industry ‘steering group’. So as The DSL Forum morphs into The Broadband Forum, one questions the limited remit of its original name and the over-ambition of the one now assumed. The body’s justification for the name change is fuzzy, citing “sophisticated applications such as IPTV”, “more responsive network provisioning”, “access agnostic management specifications” and “digital home optimization models”. The move to fibre is an underlying theme but wireless, perilously, seems largely ignored. “For some time now, we have been dealing with much more than DSL”, says George Dobrowski, Chairman and President of The Broadband Forum. “Yet we discovered that because of the DSL in our name, many of our specifications that are access agnostic, management related or provide solutions to broader broadband issues, were being missed by the standards community because they mistakenly thought our work was just DSL specific.” Breaking out of the multi-flavoured DSL space into the prismatic world of broadband is a big ask for the newly-badged Forum. Its work may yet be “missed” or “mistaken”; worse still, it may be no longer be just plain vanilla, but just plain irrelevant. Jim Chalmers |
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