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Deutsche Telekom Wholesale is future-proofing billing with business assurance, bridging the gap between business strategy and IT innovation.
Joanne Taaffe, TM Forum
How Deutsche Telekom Wholesale bridged business strategy and IT deployment
Much can get lost in translation between business and IT teams. So, when Deutsche Telekom Wholesale sought to modernize its billing platform it used TM Forum’s Business Assurance frameworks to mitigate risk and ensure it successfully translated business strategy into a customer-centric and future-proof IT deployment.
As a result, “we are designing a new billing platform that is future-proof and supports new technologies, including AI,” according to Karsten Thon, Senior Business Architect, Deutsche Telekom Wholesale.
In addition, the Wholesale division secured the unforeseen business benefit of re-using solutions freshly developed for Deutsche Telekom’s consumer division.
Karsten Thon likens the role of business assurance to the Babel Fish in The Hitchhikers’’ Guide of the Galaxy, which fits inside a human ear to interpret any language.
“When it comes to translating between IT and business you need a dictionary to align business goals with technology delivery,” he says.
The Business Assurance Framework is “a very helpful tool to structure the discussion. You can model it, or you can use it as a middle layer,” points out Thon. “When talking to the business side, you can map it with the value streams and the products and the customer journey. And if you want to talk to the IT guys, then you can map it downwards to IT capabilities and IT systems and functions. It's the translation layer between business and IT.”
The starting point when applying business assurance to the Wholesale billing migration was mapping the customer journey. This included identifying critical customer touch points and inefficiencies in the customer journey as well as facilitating future product introduction.
Once this was one done it could be translated into IT language, explains Thon.
An essential initial step for IT was to analyze the structure of the existing billing landscape and understand how it maps to future business and composable IT requirements.
“If you decompose old monolith systems into clear capabilities, then you can implement capability by capability and product by product [to create] the functional capability dimension and the product dimension,” explains Thon. “In this way,” he adds, “you can plan your migration from the old processes to the new processes. And this is one of the great advantages of a business architectural model. You are able to slice the big elephant into different [manageable] parts. And you can make implementation or migration plans based on decoupled functionalities.”
Supported by TM Forum’s Business Assurance tools, Deutsche Telekom Wholesale mapped the future customer journey against Deutsche Telekom’s Magenta AI-centric Reference Architecture, which is based on TM Forum’s Open Digital Architecture (ODA). This helped align strategies, prioritize choices and make better technology decisions “in a deliberate, designed way,” explains Thon.
In addition, detailed, structured discussions of possible solutions with internal IT architects delivered unforeseen business benefits.
“We were looking to establish which functionalities and capabilities the existing billing systems support,” explains Thon, and to define what is essential “so we really focus on the relevant capabilities we need for our business.”
As a result, the Wholesale teams identified “a solution that was newly developed for the B2C domain, and no one had realised it could be useful for wholesale, too. Functions for pricing and for discounting … were more or less 70% or 80% of what we need,” according to Thon.
“If the project team had not used the business assurance model to analyze capabilities, we wouldn’t have found these solutions inside the company. And it was only possible because we were able to describe and to structure our demands very, very clearly,” he adds.
A structured approach to analyzing how IT can reach the desired endpoint not only helped internal teams identify and reuse solutions, thereby saving time and money. It also simplifies collaboration with external suppliers.
“We can show how external suppliers can support our demands with their tools … in a very detailed and well-structured way. We can be very clear about where they can support us or if we have to develop our own capabilities.”
And since Deutsche Telekom’s Magenta IT Reference Architecture is composable and extends to AI workflows and capabilities it allows the Wholesale team to “adapt much faster to changing market conditions.”
For example, a new AI model deployed across Deutsche Telekom lets teams see whether any agentic workflows in deployment can support new business capabilities, such as a product recommendation agent that improves customer experience.
Ideally, the very human role Business Assurance can play in bridging cultures results in both business and IT teams singing from the same sheet and working together to secure the best outcome for customers, even as technology evolves.
This is important, given that “mindset is the hardest legacy system which you have to replace. It's not only technology. You must talk with the people. You have to change their mindset,” advises Thon.
“My business management at Telekom Wholesale is more and more convinced that using Business Architecture is the right way to make real achievements in executing their strategy,” concludes Thon.
