Join the author of this article, Aleksey Kim, CIO, Beeline, at Digital Transformation Asia this November where he'll be part of a panel discussion talking about how to choose the optimum strategy for OSS/BSS transformation.Nowadays, it is crucial make quick decisions and ensure overall customer satisfaction in the most efficient way. The telecommunications industry, once so successful, passed the leading positions to OTT players. Thus, we all see big and not always easy changes around us.
IT departments in telecom are not an exception, we all see the space for improvements to be made. Therefore, IT transformation becomes an exceptionally important task for OpCos. The process excites every field of an IT world with its transformational systems, methodologies, and “what’s most important?” mindsets.
“Hubization” – a neologism, that we use a lot for the past year and a half. It’s one of the ways to distribute load, centralize expertise and make things smarter and more efficient.
Distributed IT Hubs in Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, and Armenia, DMP and DBSS Hubs in Ukraine, have officially started to provide services in 2017. Some services have been extremely efficient as they were started earlier, some are just being kicked off, but overall it becomes clear that these hubs are to become “centers of excellence”.
Now that the structure of IT services is built, hubs run vital processes like fast close (Fin reporting), billing cycle, DBA administration, legacy BSS systems development and support.
Indeed, hubs’ operations are just the beginning of the many things to be changed (or polished). There are many interacting processes; the output of one process becomes input of another, so improvements in cooperation between hubs and OpCos is a focus point. Besides, IT in hub and OpCos are working closely to manage out new architecture that helps other hubs to fulfill their functions. One of the examples of such collaboration is an implementation of Oracle Vault and Oracle Advanced security tools to provide sufficient access to business information (BI) data of Armenia and Georgia for the commercial hub in Ukraine. Architecture design, testing and implementation, has been fully handled by the BI team in Kazakhstan, and most important no vendor or integrator support was involved.
Personal data confidentiality regulations and compliance are one of the challenges hubs face. And hubs are taking adequate actions to comply with them. Legacy systems support is one of the areas where actions are taken, and the range of the solutions is not limited to system changes. In 2017, BSS support of OpCo in Georgia was moved from Uzbekistan to Armenia. Staff were hired from the Armenian OpCo, and the success of this task was the result of a distributed hub approach and sufficient expertise of IT in Armenia. New systems and implementations are in line with personal data regulations. New expertise and skills gained in one country are easily transferred across the region.
Within the period of my work in operations in several countries and OpCos, I’ve seen different levels of expertise, high level of staff rotation, lack of qualified resources, or no way to extend head count. Thus I strongly believe we must put our efforts to build up teams that provide the best services possible across our region. We must foster the growth of expertise and think of new ways to make the hubs not just centers of transactional operations, but make them work at the cutting edge of technology and development.
