Transformation is not what it used to be, which was a technology-driven, behind the scenes effort to seamlessly, and invisibly upgrade the network, as far as the customer was concerned anyway. Amdocs and Vodafone outlined a new approach on October 21 in a session entitled 'IT resilience and the migration dilemma' at TM Forum’s Digital Transformation World Series; an approach which is business led, IT-driven and transparent. The session, sponsored by Nexign, was part of the Forum's Cloud Native IT & Agility theme, and is available to watch on-demand now.Avishai Sharlin, Division President at Amdocs, said everyone wants to achieve business agility, but not everyone has the same plan for getting there. Current approaches include what Sharlin calls the commerce overlay, which is an approach that starts small and then grows. Some organizations look to modernizing their monetization, charging engine, or policy engine. Others try a hybrid or end-to-end approach. Increasingly, all approaches share one perspective, Sharlin said. That transformation is a business decision; it is a business-driven transformation.
“Once you decide what is the business objective, then all the rest falls in place. The thing is, you need to support all the permutation from a technology perspective, and as a vendor, you need to be ready to find yourself in the different scenarios,” Sharlin said.
Ralf Hellebrand, Head of Solstice Transformation at Vodafone, agreed, saying that being business driven is the key to a company’s current transformation effort. For too long, industry transformations have been driven by IT, which led project deliveries that were outdated or out of sync with other domains in the company.
Hellebrand said that in Vodafone Germany, the company is doing an overarching transformation that must be business led, but IT driven, and it must adhere to three key factors:
- Value: It is a business transformation with what Hellebrand called value protection. “We want to deliver benefits for our customers and ourselves, but we do have a value to protect. Vodafone is a globally acting telco, and we have created value for our customers, and we are delivering this value constantly. We can't go and start with a greenfield, and not respect that. So, we need to take this bit into account.”
- Simplification: Telcos have grown into quite complex beasts, he said. “Customers often don't understand anymore how all these product offerings go together. Sometimes we are in a situation that we don't understand ourselves either. So, we need to simplify this, and deliver benefits through that simplification.”
- Cooperation: Going from a regular telco to a digital telco requires more technology cooperation, incorporating more players from across the industry
Hellebrand said that companies need to decide if they want to do a flash-cut migration of customers and data, or an iterative migration? Do they want to do the transformation internally so that customers are unaware, or include the customers in the process in the name of transparency and to promote the benefits.
The cloud impact on transformation
Regarding the way cloud has impacted transformation, Sharlin said that with the complexity of today’s ecosystems, cloud today is the foundation for everything. “If you want to reach the [desired] time to market, if you want to become part of this digitized ecosystem, if you want your business to be modernized, you need to adopt cloud technology,” he said.
Sharlin added that cloud technology has a vital part to play in creating this change. Being modern takes modern tools. It takes ecosystems. “Once you become cloud native you are part of an ecosystem that is evolving and growing with thousands and hundreds of thousands of different applications that can be part of your richer ecosystem.”
Ian Turkington, Vice President of Architecture and APIs at TM Forum noted that transformation is not just about moving applications into the cloud. Transformation also needs to actually change how the people work and adopt different methods.
Hellebrand likened the industry way of working until now to the Henry Ford principle: cluster people and work into silos where they stay focused on their task. “It worked pretty well for a while. But now we need to rethink that,” he said.
The industry needs to approach work in a more collaborative way because all areas of the businesses and all partners in an ecosystem can be affected. “Collaboration requires trust, trust requires transparency of information and a transparent information flow. And all this brings us step by step, closer to an agile way of working, Hellenbrand said.
It does not stop there, Hellebrand added. When all of a sudden you need to talk to other people in the industry, or in your ecosystem, it becomes a cultural change because you can no longer dictate how process and work will flow. “You can only ask,” he said.
Hellebrand pointed to Vodafone’s long-term relationship with Amdocs as an example of how relationships change. He explained that in the past, the company had written long documents then followed them to the letter, “All of a sudden, we don't want that anymore. We want to be more flexible and collaborative. And we need to respect this is turning Amdocs from being a vendor into being a partner. Collaboration, transparency, working together in mixed teams…that's a cultural change for the whole industry, not just for the telco itself. And this is what we are applying here.”
In addition to taking a business-led approach and tying management into transformation projects, Sharlin said it is as essential to make sure that people are adhering to new skills and adopting new processes. This has implications for recruiting and hiring new people. “We have to make sure we have the right DevOps and cloud skills within the organization. On the other hand, we need to tie those with existing manpower and their know-how [and] understanding of the industry,” he said. “So, making sure that culture and making sure that the processes are supporting this transformation is very important.
Earlier this month,
Amdocs won a TM Forum Excellence Award in The Human Factor category for its internal transformation. This category focuses on how organizational structures, behavior and culture are changing from analog to digital, as a new generation brings business and agile technology skills across the organization.
You can watch the full session on-demand now. Watch the rest of Digital Transformation World Series content live and on-demand now too! Not registered for DTWS yet? There’s still time. Join 12,000 of your peers online through November 12. CSPs receive complimentary passes. Sign up here. 
