Companies can't move fast unless processes are highly automated, and preferably customer provisioned. In other cases, installations require just one person, instead of two, notes Van Zant. One customer, Time Warner Austin, has sliced PC configuration times in half and cut total install times to as little as 15 minutes, says Van Zant. At the same time, productivity increased 50 percent, since each installer was able to complete six jobs a day instead of just four. Service providers can't move fast if their billing systems don't support multi-party billing for content transactions, for example.
Flexibility also is part of a speed-based approach.
What you want, for example, is the ability to respond to a competitor's launch in 24 hours. Where it often takes months to install a new 45 Mbps connection, Yipes offers a scalable service operating between 1 Mbps and 1 Gbps, scalable virtually on the fly. Dramatically slicing the time to provision new bandwidth also is the story behind Layer One, which provides carrier neutral optical interconnection hubs. The whole idea is to eliminate the months of time often required to provision a new optical link for a customer. Think of Layer One as the sort of network access point Internet service providers use to exchange traffic.