DTNA 2018: Can CSPs transform themselves into digital genies?

Dawn Bushaus, Managing Editor, TM Forum is at Digital Transformation North America and Action Week this week and will be sharing her insights and observations throughout this week. Here she discusses some of what the esteemed keynote speakers had to say. Read on.

Nearly three quarters of 5G use cases (worth about $400 billion in potential revenue) require communications service providers (CSPs) to change their operating models. Operators that aren’t already transforming their operational and business support systems (OSS/BSS) to address this market risk being left behind. This reality was echoed by keynote speakers here in Dallas at Digital Transformation North America.

Telco IT traditionally has been a cost center, but this must change. “CSPs must realize that IT/operations is the business,” said TM Forum CEO Nik Willetts.

“[Digital transformation] won’t be a big bang,” he added. “We need to be continuously improving and learning; that’s the key – it’s an iterative process. That means a very different role for software and IT within the business.”

Time is shrinking

Rajeev Chandrasekharan, CIO, Verizon Business Markets, agreed. He noted that the amount of time companies have to adopt new technologies is shrinking.

For example, it took 75 years for the telephone to reach 50 million users. “Now when you put a popular app in the App Store, you go from zero to 50 million users in under 19 days,” he said.

While time is shrinking, compute power and data are growing, and companies are breaking the rules of engagement, as evidenced by the rapid adoption of platform business models.

“We end up living in a world where if we are not careful, it’s not a question of winning or keeping up – you won’t even survive,” Chandrasekharan said. “You need to be able to do this sort of transformation. Companies need to reinvent themselves every five to seven years to keep up with these trends.”

Change vs. transformation

When it comes to digital transformation, CSPs must think about who their customers are, Willetts said.

“As an industry, we have been focused on B2C markets – B2B doesn’t get the same headlines,” he explained. “But it’s where we can have the biggest impact, in enabling business transformation.”

Chandrasekharan also noted that there is a big difference between “change” and “transformation”.

“If you’re at stage A and you’re looking to go to stage B, if you achieve some aspect of stage B and stage A still remains, that’s change,” he said. “Transformation implies that stage A doesn’t exist at all – you completely become something else.”

Reimagining transformation

According to Chandrasekharan, CSPs need to reimagine three critical aspects of their businesses in order to transform successfully:

• Culture within CSP organizations including people, skills and processes


• Capabilities and technologies that can change the way CSPs deliver services to customers – this includes imagining capabilities and technologies operators don’t have now but may need in the future


• How customers’ needs are changing – how do operating models need to change to serve the customer

Messing with time

Customers’ needs are the most important consideration in any digital transformation, and they want their needs to be met on demand, with ease and at the best price point possible.

Delivering services on demand requires CSPs to “mess with the perception of time”, which means eliminating what Chandrasekharan calls “white time”.

“You need to collapse all the wasted time [such as the time customers spend waiting] and get to the end state more quickly,” he said.

Keep it simple

Chandrasekharan and Willetts both stressed the importance of simplification, with Willetts saying that telcos are used to taking an “engineering mindset approach to transformation”.

“We make things more complex than they need to be and we tend to take the approach of big bang transformation,” he said. “You need to start with radical simplification. You’ve got to get radical about cutting out the complexity and look at automation for core aspects of the business, with end-to-end zero-touch as the goal, saying, “We have way too much complexity in our companies today. We make things more complex than need to be and do big bang transformation.”

As Chandrasekharan put it: “Building something complex is very easy; building something simple is very hard.”

Break the rules

To transform successfully and meet customers’ needs, CSPs must break the rules, he added.

“You can follow the rules and not survive, or you can break the rules – or in some cases you can make new rules; that’s allowed too,” he said. “We have to reinvent ourselves.”

As an example of breaking rules, he pointed to changing the way CSPs interact with customers through bots. “Suddenly with the advent of natural language processing we have voice assistance – a humanized engagement has completely changed the game.”

Enter the digital genie

Ultimately, customers don’t care about technology or systems per se. They want to know how systems and technology can help them. How can they think, say (communicate) or do for them?

“The customer is saying, ‘You have all this great information, all this data. Can you put all of these things together and think for me’?” Chandrasekharan said. They also want information communicated to them and they want to know how the CSP can help them.

“They’re trying to treat the organization [the CSP] as another human being,” he added.

He suggested that what customers need is a digital genie.

“A digital genie is nothing but a construct which essentially says if you take all your capabilities and technologies and humanize it into ‘think, say and do’, you can get the customer to believe that there is an all-powerful, all-knowing entity on the other side. This is where we need to go, and this is where the industry is going.”