For the second year running we have surveyed European telecoms on their IT use. Our  benchmark study looks at IT spending as a share of revenues and also probes the IT effectiveness of telecom operators. While the IT spend on revenues is easy to measure,  IT effectiveness is more complicated. We have developed a score that takes into account three key dimensions: time-to-market for new products and new tariffs, IT service availability and functional coverage per key IT domain (e.g., sales & marketing, provisioning).

Preliminary findings show that fixed line operators have improved their cost position by about 1 percentage point, which is a a significant improvement, while their effectiveness score rose by about 10 percent. Mobile operators have not improved their cost position but have improved their IT effectiveness by about 6 percent.

Overall the effectiveness of both fixed and mobile operators has also improved along all dimensions, i.e., time-to-market, service availability and functional coverage.

This year's results confirm some of the key findings from last year’s survey: Best performers have strict demand management, have fewer vendors and manage them wisely, reduce the complexity of their architecture and have well-structured application development methodologies.

To elaborate a bit on the architectural piece of the puzzle. IT architecture complexity reduction can be measured in two ways:

1) Best performers clearly have fewer applications in the three core domains that are Business Support Systems, Operating Support Systems and and Management and Support domains. The difference between best and worst performers is a factor of about two.

2) Best performers clearly leverage packaged software better. They use more of it and stick to  off-the-shelf features with limited customization.

A final version of our findings will be available in late October, and we look forward to sharing additional insights into what we have learned.