مدل آزمون امکان سنجی برای توسعه خدمات مخابراتی جدید با استفاده از روش MCDM : یک مطالعه موردی از خدمات ویدئویی تلفن در کره جنوبی

The telecommunications industry is undergoing dramatic changes fueled by rapid technical development and regulatory changes. Especially, in Korea, the penetration rate of mobile service is almost 90%; therefore, there is not enough room for a new customer. Furthermore, today’s new services have been influenced by more factors in decision making before launching. It has been the main issue for decision makers whether a new service will be successful or not. However, a few methods have been introduced to evaluate the feasibility of a new service. And very few papers have introduced to the evaluatation of comparative advantages among competitive services, but such methods mainly depend on subjective opinion of experts. The proposed model considers the multidimensional factors influencing telecom service evaluation based on the ANP’s advantages, which helps service providers in a telecom field to select a new service with the view of their strategies. Also, the BSC perspectives are adapted in the model to generate evaluation measures. Additionally, a new video phone service in Korea is evaluated based on a proposed model.

The telecommunications industry is undergoing dramatic changes fueled by rapid technical development and regulatory changes (Ahn, Kim, & Lee, 2005). Especially, in Korea, the penetration rate of mobile service is almost 90%; there is not enough room for new customers (NIA, 2007). Furthermore, in the telecom service market, the uncertainty of customer needs makes it very difficult to develop a new service, since customers’ preferences for services are ever changing. In addition, there is the effect of the third party’s uncertainty such as regulatory change, competitive landscapes, cost estimations, and technology changes (Ahn & Skudlark, 2002). These uncertainties usually create risks to service providers, but they can be opportunities as long as they are able to manage the uncertainties. To reduce the uncertainties in the new service development process, the feasibility test enables a company to make a decision on whether to continue or to discard a telecom service development (Ahn & Skudlark, 2002). Less than 15% of new product development projects are commercially successful (Cooper, 2001). For that reason, the major issue in the new product development is how to evaluate the future success of the new products (Balachandra, 1984 and Benson et al., 1993). But it is more difficult to predict the success of service than products because it is hard to evaluate before being used by the customers (Easingwood, 1986). Although today’s new services have much more factors that influence in decision making before their launch, most of the evaluation methods for a new product development process only focus on the effect of financial benefit, service quality, the possible volume of potential customers, requirement of customers and so on. As a result, the decision makers need to have a comprehensive evaluation model for the feasibility of new services. A very few papers have introduced the evaluation of comparative advantages among competitive services by using the CUP (Cost Utility Preference) model, scenario planning and case-based methodology, but such methods mainly depend on the subjective opinion of experts (Ahn et al., 2005, Ahn and Skudlark, 2002, Bowers, 1989, Ozer, 2005 and Ozer, 2008). Therefore, this paper aims to propose a feasibility test model for new telecom service development using MCDM (Multiple Criteria Decision Making) method. Furthermore, proposed feasibility test model is verified by a case study of video telephone service in Korea. Due to the multidimensional factors that influence telecom service evaluation, the comprehensive and practical model in this paper is proposed based on the ANP’s advantages, which helps the service providers in a telecom field to select new services with the view of their strategies. Using pairwise comparisons of elements on a criterion, both the AHP (Analytic Hierarchy Process) and ANP (Analytic Network Process) can derive priorities, but the ANP can deal with all kinds of dependences systematically (Niemira & Saaty, 2004), thus it has been used successfully in many fields such as manufacturing, management, and evaluation, which is different from the AHP method (Agarwal and Shankar, 2002, Karsak et al., 2003, Lee and Kim, 2001, Meade and Presley, 2002, Partovi, 2001, Partovi and Corredoira, 2002, Shang et al., 2004 and Yurdakul, 2004). Also, the BSC perspectives are adapted in the model to generate evaluation measures. The BSC is widely used to evaluate the business performance in various fields including the consulting firm. In addition, the BSC can help decision makers to evaluate the services with an objective and balanced view based on four perspectives such as financial, learning and growth, internal business process, and customer (Kaplan & Norton, 1992). This paper is organized as follows. In the next section, a process of new product and service development is introduced, and model for telecom service evaluation is reviewed with the related literature. The proposed model is explained in the third section, which consists of three phases; (1) the BSC phase for deriving perspectives and measures, (2) the ANP phase for generating network model to be evaluated, and (3) the evaluation procedure for deciding the feasibility of a service is presented. In Section 4, video telephone service in Korea is evaluated according to the proposed feasibility test model. The research finishes with concluding remarks in Section 5.

It has been a main issue for the decision makers whether a new service will be successful or not. However, a few methods have been introduced to evaluate the success of a new service, even which shows very limited approaches. In other words, previous researches are not fit for a high-tech market even though they try to consider multi criteria of a new service. Also, customers’ needs and market situation have changed dramatically, fueled by the advance of technology. As a result of high-tech companies like telecom service, providers need a comprehensive evaluation tool for a new service more than ever. In this study, we developed a new model to evaluate the feasibility of a new telecom service based on BSC & ANP methods, which can cover multicriteria decision making process and consider all kinds of dependencies systematically. In addition, the feasibility of a video telephone service was tested with the proposed model. As the result of our case study, the feasibility of a new service is to be verified by comparison with another competitive services, and the best alternative is also recommended by the proposed model. Another finding from the research is that the decision may be influenced by what service the decision makers take part in and which service they prepare to launch. The case shows the fact that the determinants for alternative depend on what kind of business the company is operating. Thus, it is natural that each business has a different result. For instance, a wireless company is interested in a new service related to their wireless business considering customer perspective. However, wired broadband service providers will focus on the technology centric factors and they regard BcN as the best alternative, and this model can be applied to other industrial area with a similar way. The future research may seek to broaden the model with respect to customers’ preferences by using a large scale survey for a new service. Based on the time-series analysis, until a new service is launched, the validity of decision and factors that are proposed by the model can be evaluated.