MOBILE BIG DATA: THE SILVER BULLET FOR TELCOS? A CASE STUDY IN THE NORWEGIAN TELCOS MARKET

The telecommunication industry has been undergoing tremendous changes in recent times. It is obvious that the industry is currently going through an identity crisis. Porter’s Five Forces analysis is used in this paper to investigate the current state of the telecommunication industry in Norway today. The dwindling voice revenue of telcos necessitates the race to find the next revenue stream. This study explores the potential of mobile big data as a resource for telcos to gain competitive advantage with the VRIO Framework (Value-Rare-Imitability-Organization) from the Resources-based View(RBV) theory. Multiple case studies with embedded units that are explanatory and exploratory are applied to Norwegian telcos, following an inductive approach. This study finds that the outlook of the telecommunication industry is rather bleak and despite its promises, mobile big data can only provide temporary competitive advantage to the telcos. Mobile big data is valuable, rare and the telcos are organizing their other resources around it to exploit it, however mobile big data is imitable and not unique. The same data can be obtained by their peers in the industry. Instead, the interview data collected from qualitative research in this study has pointed to organizational culture as the resource that can provide sustained competitive advantage to the telcos. In a highly-competitive industry such as the telecommunication industry, telcos have to constantly rely on resources that can give them temporary competitive advantage; the ability to do this will ultimately be a resource itself that will give them sustained competitive advantage. Telcos have to constantly mix, match and reconfigure their different resources and capabilities to address a rapidly changing environment.