a mARTIAN dIARY

Recently my friends (Vishwa and Vijay)  and I ( I know “I” seems odd but MS Word wont let me have it otherwise and yeah I know its PROPER English :P)  were discussing a problem that that’s having a detrimental effect on the sleep patterns of a lot of engineers and managers in the mobile phone industry.

The Problem can be stated as “The Missed call facility along with the Caller line identification feature is being misused by the customers by using the same to avoid making revenue generating calling.”
The main challenges accompanied with the problem is that

1. The problem in itself is not explicitly illegal/ unethical from the customer view point to solve by any legislation.
2. Any penalty/cost to be imposed on the missed will also be inadvertly penalizing the people making “genuine” missed calls.
3. A lot of customers with intent to make revenue generating services are not getting access to the system which in turn is costing the company invisible revenue loss.
4. The solution for the 3rd problem requires investment for a larger infrastructure than what is not financially justified by the actual “active” customers in the network based on the current revenue model

Now to apply the TRIZ contradiction matrix to this problem, it needs to be stated as a contradiction.
There may be multiple ways of stating the problem as a contradiction but I take up this specific way -:

Say you improve reliability of the network by limiting the total number of users as stated in the 4th challenge then the worsening quality is that the quantity of connections that can be offered with the same infrastructure is reduced and consequently revenue is affected.

Or in TRIZ terms it can be stated as

Improving Feature: Reliability Vs Worsening Feature: Quantity of the substance

This is a very abstract way of representing the contradiction but TRIZ is after all an abstraction
The solutions can be looked up at  http://www.triz40.com/
Solutions are
21. Skipping

• Conduct a process, or certain stages (e.g. destructible, harmful or hazardous operations) at high speed.

28 Mechanics substitution

• Replace a mechanical means with a sensory (optical, acoustic, taste or smell) means.
• Use electric, magnetic and electromagnetic fields to interact with the object.
• Change from static to movable fields, from unstructured fields to those having structure.
• Use fields in conjunction with field-activated (e.g. ferromagnetic) particles.

40. Composite materials

• Change from uniform to composite (multiple) materials.

3. Local quality

• Change an object’s structure from uniform to non-uniform, change an external environment (or external influence) from uniform to non-uniform.
• Make each part of an object function in conditions most suitable for its operation.
• Make each part of an object fulfill a different and useful function.

Now the theme among most of them is the break up the service especially looking at the  rule “Change from uniform to composite (multiple) materials.” (The quantity here being the number of connections as defined by us earlier) or from all 3 rules in “Local Quality”.

Now translating this into terms specific to our problem we can come with with- :
Provide different services with different QoS but at corresponding costs. As in, provide two or more separate networks, one that has a poor QoS but also has a much lesser “infrastructural cost” to be levied from the customers and provide another high quality network where the cost of service is higher but QoS is better.

This may at first glance seem to penalize the people who would be responsible for generating revenue even in the first case. But only by going into the actual financial details can we ascertain whether these new networks would exist at a higher cost segment or in the similar band as to now. (The lower QoS network might even get cheaper)

In one way I had always this solution in mind and probably that why I was able to see thru the esoteric solutions given by TRIZ, but then again innovations ultimately has to come from the Innovator: P

 Now the funny part -:  This already exists! In a way that is…

Take the case of Bangalore

There are three prominent GSM providers -:
Spice Hutch and Airtel.

For people who have experience with the networks they can see the semblance between spice with the first network (extremely low cost but not that great QoS), Hutch ( Low Cost and decent enough QoS) and Airtel ( the costliest of the lot with probably the best QoS)