Looking at the vast technological disruptions in this era, it is no secret that APIs play a major role in innovating breakthrough business models. However, just opening up APIs itself will not help telcos to conquer digital transformation bringing in new revenues for themselves; it’s the services that are built on top of them that do.
Clearly, facilitating service innovation to reach its maximum potential has to be on the top of telcos checklist to overcome modern digital disrupt challenges. Extending innovation capabilities focusing on easy and rapid service creation is how telcos can reach this milestone.
As more and more technological companies start to focus on digital services we can identify a massive involvement of programmers with strong tech backgrounds being encouraged to create more digital services. It is true that they possess exceptional programming skills to build complex algorithms and think out of the box for a given problem, yet we should not ignore the fact that there’s even a community of non techies that may have bright entrepreneurial ideas. It could be the barriers of programming skills that hold them back from taking their ideas live. These non techies may even add up to a larger share of a given community that could result in larger number of services implemented if they get on with service innovation.
Extending service creation capabilities to increase the number of services should not only focus on developers who are in fact even a smaller portion of a community. Service innovation should become a dominant topic even among these parties with no prior coding knowledge –the Non developers! Telcos need to attract more non developers, grass root level startups and enterprises to result in a proliferation of services being spawned out. Extending innovation capabilities even among thriving enterprises will result in these business entities to gain seamless sophistication in creating new services on top of telco assets.
How can a telco identify these possibilities and facilitate Innovation by all?
In the journey of enabling innovation for everyone, telcos have to go beyond the norm of just opening up APIs to third party service creators and facilitate a platform for everyone to create services. It will be necessary for Telcos to build a service innovation layer on top of their API Management platform  enabling  seamless service creation for developers who use APIs to code their way through services as well as for non-developers and enterprises who may not have prior coding knowledge. This will in turn build up a complete eco system driving service innovation for Telcos!
In doing so, Telcos need to aid intense service innovation backed by smooth and consistent service creation possibilities having separate service creation environments specific to each entity. Telcos can introduce self-care, end to end service creation environments facilitating developers with rich set of tools covering the entire app development lifecycle. They can focus on creating developer support mechanisms with on line forums etc. where they will be given guidance on the issues faced.
Telco can also facilitate service creation for non-developers and enterprises to create Value added services through App creation wizards, pre-defined app patterns, drag and drop components and industry specific app templates etc. Such measures of widening the spectrum of app creators will result in proliferation of services which will in turn create new revenue streams for telcos.
Redefining telcos existing business model will be definitely challenging and exciting. It is time now for telcos to start going beyond APIs to advocate service creation in large proportions by enabling everyone to create new services and start monetize on their ideas/ solutions. This way telcos can unlock the true potential of their APIs to generate recurring revenue in this era of digital disruption.
