Digital transformation: Opening up a new era for O&M

With new technologies such as 5G, IoT, and extended reality emerging, networks and services are becoming increasing complex to manage and operate. This is making operations and maintenance (O&M) increasingly critical, which without care, could become a barrier for carriers to execute their digital transformation strategy and grow their business. As a result, the whole telco industry is actively exploring methods to improve the effectiveness and efficiency of their O&M capabilities. In this article, we will share some complementary approaches which have been shown to be effective in improving O&M performance and business impact.

O&M and network capabilities must develop in parallel

There is growing excitement within the industry about the potential of Autonomous Networks (AN) to improve customer experience, deliver new services and gain operation efficiency. According to a survey by TM Forum in 2021, 88% of carriers expect there to be large scale deployment of AN in the next decade. This will profoundly affect O&M transformation.

Zero Touch Operations: A critical success factor for autonomous networks

As time progresses, many O&M procedures have evolved to become very complex, leading to long cycle-times and a corresponding increase in customer waiting time. This is having a large impact on operating costs and customer experience. Huawei's own experience, derived from many managed services projects, shows that the average cost of trouble ticket handling increases by US$100 per trouble ticket for every additional procedure in a carrier's troubleshooting process. Similarly, the average customer waiting time increases by two hours for each additional procedure added to the customer complaint handling process. It is therefore not surprising that many leading carriers are trying to become more responsive to customers by using automation to eliminate the waste created by unnecessarily complex procedures.

A well-known regional carrier in China is a good example. Their new network O&M model has a goal of "1-5-15-0" for issue handling - detect within 1 minute, diagnosis within 5 minutes, and recover within 15 minutes - all with zero service impact. To achieve this goal, they integrated proactive prevention and closed-loop troubleshooting capabilities. Their O&M system is now able to automatically predict many core network operational faults 15 minutes in advance. It can also demarcate five types of cross-layer faults within 15 minutes, and support disaster recovery with just one click.

Experience-driven operation for better user experience and values

Huawei's project practices have shown that effective use of network data can dramatically improve user experience, leading to a 30% improvement in user satisfaction as well as concomitant increases in product upsell conversion rate.

An accurate, real-time, quantitative measure of perceived user experience is required to achieve such effects. With such a metric in place, the factors that really impact user experience can be identified and addressed. A Latin American carrier has created this metric using an AI model to correlate network key quality indicators (KQIs) with user experience. This model has helped the carrier accurately identify and optimize areas of poor perceived user experience, increasing data throughput rates by 90% and thereby releasing 71% of suppressed traffic.

Similarly, a Chinese carrier has shifted to a user-experience focused operation practice. By using spatiotemporal technologies with AI capabilities, they have established digital twin models of people, things, services, and networks, which has allowed them to optimize network performance with customer experience as the key driver. Now, with the same amount of optimization resource, they are receiving 21% fewer complaints from users.

Up-skilling O&M personnel with low-code software development

The adoption of new technologies requires O&M personnel to learn new skills, so providing a low-code software development capability that allows staff to quickly develop their own tools and applications which better align their daily work and challenges has become critical. With such a capability, O&M knowledge can now easily be injected into the supporting platforms to allow employees to drive the O&M transformation themselves. This reduces training overhead, lowers the entry barrier and leads to much greater employee fulfilment and engagement. An Asia Pacific carrier has recently introduced an O&M system with low-code software development capabilities. Within six months, 45 O&M personnel were able to develop the necessary skills to create over 10 new O&M capabilities. Furthermore, the average development period has been reduced from two months to two weeks, allowing much faster rollout of O&M automation capabilities.

Looking to the future, Huawei believes that it is important for the industry to work together to develop O&M transformation best practices which leverage the latest digital technologies and skills. In particular, we offer the following recommendations to carriers:

1. Focus on key technologies such as AI, spatiotemporal analysis, low-code development, and intelligent network equipment to drive breakthroughs from theory through to large-scale deployment.
2. Increase the business value of O&M by investing in the capabilities required to move towards experience-driven O&M with zero-touch operations.
3. Up-skill O&M personnel using low-code development and the latest data governance and analytics capabilities to encourage and create new and more efficient ways of working.