Aloke Kapur, Partner, BearingPoint, and member of TM Forum's Digital Ecosystems Advisory Board, highlights how, through an ecosystem of partners collaborating and co-innovating, all businesses can become more agile in the face of digital disruption.Why did you want to join TM Forum’s Digital Ecosystem Advisory Board?Through my learnings from over 20 years’ experience cross-industry, I help bridge the gap, connecting telcos with other industries and demonstrate how they can better capitalize on digital opportunities together. This could be through identifying use cases and potential ecosystem plays for different industry verticals and how telcos can enable and be relevant to those industries.
How does your current role complement your contribution to this advisory board?My experience working with clients at senior levels within organizations in multiple industries allows me to better understand their challenges. More recently working directly with telcos I am involved in projects and senior-level discussions to help them overcome their challenges and importantly address the opportunities for how they can support their clients in other industries to thrive in the digital world.
How would you describe how your organization helps clients’ enterprise-wide digital transformation strategies?BearingPoint works with clients to support their digital transformation journeys. Digital transformation for most enterprises covers a spectrum from digitalizing existing processes – what I call “polishing the existing operating model” (i.e. cost take-out), through to using technology to create new business models and new revenue streams. Most organizations are still at the stage of optimizing their existing operating model, whilst only some are starting to look at new business models. The latter should be an urgent undertaking for all existing businesses when you consider that digital natives don’t have an existing operating model to optimize – they can just come in with new business models.
How do you guide your clients to deliver their strategies?Business optimization and improving operational efficiencies using new digital technologies is only the first step. Business model innovation is where the real digital transformation will take place. BearingPoint supports our customers across the spectrum, from digital business optimization, all the way to full digital business transformation and new business models. We provide guidance and the tools to make this a reality. Through an ecosystem of partners collaborating and co-innovating, all businesses can become more agile in the face of digital disruption. Telcos are ideally placed to enable the necessary business model changes, and TM Forum has a key role to play here in being the ‘connector’ to facilitate collaboration between members and non-members.
What are the biggest challenges your clients face in achieving their digital transformation aims?Many clients are so overwhelmed at trying to cut through the noise, the hype and the latest ‘next big thing’, they find it difficult to see the bigger picture, to focus on their vision and how they are going to meet their end customers’ needs. There is a need to shift mindsets from a technology emphasis, onto how to harness opportunities the technology, such as IoT, 4G and 5G, presents to solve their customers’ problems. Organizations need to develop clarity in their digital strategies – are they optimizing what they do, enhancing customer experience, or creating new revenue opportunities? How are their initiatives meeting one of these objectives?
TM Forum’s recent research shows the benefits of bringing CTO and CIO teams together, do you see this happening?There is a definite need to collaborate within organizations, to remove silos and streamline business, bringing IT and ‘the business’ closer together. CTOs and CIOs, along with COOs, CMOs & CFOs, all have key roles to play. The ‘servant IT’ approach of the last 20 years – of the business telling IT what it wants – now needs to rapidly evolve to a more symbiotic relationship.
The business still needs to know what it wants to achieve but the IT department needs to help with leading the thinking as to the ‘art of the possible’ to create new and innovative business opportunities that one function alone would not be able to imagine. For example, it is not just about 5G technology, it is about how 5G will change the life of the customer, and supporting the customer on their journey. ‘Collaboration’ and ‘partnering’ within and across organizations are the absolute watch words.
As part of our research, we asked CSPs to rank the challenges to converging networks and operations. They cited culture first. Why is it such a challenge, what are the cultural challenges, and what can operators do to address this change?Culture is a huge challenge – it can be difficult to motivate and persuade people to push themselves and their business in new directions, especially when both business and operating models have been entrenched, often for decades. One way to overcome this is to broaden boundaries and work with a growing network of partners over different verticals that can inject a change of culture, new ways of thinking and new opportunities into the business.
How is the convergence of networks and IT affecting the relationship between CSPs and suppliers?We see the future as moving away from individual selling products and services, to offering outcome-based solutions and on to Solution-as-a-Service. Organizations will be able to advance their business more rapidly with a combination of solutions instead of single pieces bought separately from individual vendors. Suppliers need to leave behind the mindset of buying and selling one product alone. Organizations need to work together with various partners to solve their customers’ problems – enabling new products and services to penetrate the market faster, with substantially lower risk and cost. Telcos can and should be the enablers of this for all industries.
What’s the role for automation in the network of the future? Why is it necessary, and does the deployment of 5G increase the requirement for automation?Automation will play a key role in the network of the future, especially with technology such as 5G speeding up both a business’ potential to move forward,
andcustomer expectations. However, automation is not an end in itself – critical will be the services that are offered across these networks. Here, collaboration will be key to realizing the potential that the technologies offer. Those who adopt partnering, ecosystems and platforms that utilize the technology are expected to be the ones who will succeed.Such ecosystems will need to be automated and scalable to meet these new demands.
Click here to meet other members of TM Forum’s Digital Ecosystem Advisory Board 
