How Telekom Malaysia's CIO aims to monetize internal innovation

Things are changing quickly within Telekom Malaysia’s (TM) IT department. One indication of just how fast is the speed with which it has leapt to the top of TM Forum’s Open API Certification leaderboard. As of June, it had 219 certified TM Forum Open APIs, up from only three in September 2023.

That reflects the company’s concerted efforts to create open, standardized, monetizable platforms for use by third parties and internal business teams, as TM’s CIO, Ivan Chong, explains to TM Forum’s Inform.

Chong, who joined the company in September 2023, has drawn up seven strategic focus areas for the IT division, among which is the adoption of TM Forum’s Open APIs and Open Digital Architecture.

“We used to have a grand total of 1,376 custom APIs serving our ecosystem of over 259 applications,” explains Chong. Now the company relies on “300 optimized APIs of which 219 are certified with TM Forum with a reusability ratio of one to three. What this means is that from one API only serving one application, a single API is now reusable to an average of three applications.”

Standardized APIs not only increase code reusability, which in turn reduces coding repetition and facilitates maintenance, they also eliminate the need to pay vendors to adapt proprietary code to new products and services, explains Chong.

This mattered greatly because “two and a half years ago the [IT] ecosystem was 82% end of life and end of support,” according to Chong. “Every time we launched products to the market, it would touch easily 40% of code.” In addition, it would take several months to get products to market.

Today, TM has modernized 70% of its IT estate and by 2026 aims to be running approximately half of the 259 IT managed applications, which was the baseline in 2022. The move has altered both vendor relationships and internal roles. Whereas in 2022 80% of TM’s IT functions were outsourced, now 80% of all IT work is insourced. As a result, rather than managing vendor relationships and maintaining legacy systems, today IT teams focus on helping the wider business use technology to achieve strategic goals.

Telco-in-a-box

One example of how modernization is helping the business is the recent adoption of a new BSS to serve TM’s mobile customers.

It was an uphill battle to convince the company to be the first in the country to implement a full-suite Digital BSS, Chong explains: "For any of our stakeholders to be convinced, they needed to see to believe." He therefore brought everyone on a ‘Tech Exploration’ journey, which included a ‘Proof of Concept’ to demonstrate how the platform would work better and faster, while also being more economically viable.

Once he convinced the organization to adopt what he calls a “telco-in-a-box” it took 218 days from the initial development of a minimum viable product to fully deploy the BSS-as-a-service, which supports TM’s mobile business with 99.9% migration accuracy. Importantly for Chong, it is 98% out of the box. This is in stark contrast to the old system which was 80% customized.

And “because it's low code and no code [we can] configure and launch products that used to take four to six months in just a matter of days or even the following day,” according to Chong.

This has helped transform how IT teams work with the rest of the business.

“Rather than serving internal IT needs, they're working on monetization … with internal business teams to develop products,” says Chong.

Roll out also enabled TM’s IT teams to prune processes. Chong established an internal center of excellence to oversee the telco-in-a-box roll-out, from ideation and requirement gathering, through to design, configuration and deployment. As members of the center of excellence progressed, they identified overlap between TM’s processes and those of the system. When there were no overlaps, “that formulated the next step, which is a decision on do we still need this process or not?” he says.

The next stage will be to run all consumer mobile and fixed services on the cloud-based BSS-as-a-service, and to deploy a separate BSS to support the more complex and customized needs of enterprise and wholesale customers.

Monetizing internal skills and innovation

The speed of transformation has only been possible because of intensive and continuous training of the 700-strong IT team over the last two and a half years.

“If our internal resources had not been upskilled, I would not have this confidence to rip off the plaster. Our fats have become muscles, so we're able to do things on our own,” points out Chong.

Such is Chong’s confidence in his teams’ new skills, he foresees partnering with Whale Cloud to deliver a telco-in-a-box to other communications service providers, with TM implementing the system while Whale Cloud provides the product.

TM’s reinforced IT skills have also enabled the company to build a new AI/ML Ops tool that has improved resolution time by 67%.

In 2022, for example the company’s “longest streak of being incident free was 20 days and every single incident would either have a customer impact or a revenue impact,” says Chong. Now, however “we're now over nearly a year incident free.”

Again, Chong sees an opportunity to sell the in-house AI/ML Ops tool, this time to enterprises, adding that “anything to do with service management, operations, event monitoring, is extremely close to my heart.”

APIs developed internally are another potential revenue generator, believes Chong. Currently TM Forum’s APIs serve principally to enable the IT department to quickly bundle solutions and services for the rest of the business . But “now we want to move into transactional API monetization” he says.

When it comes to AI, however, Chong is more cautious than many of his peers.

“We have only gone as far as building our own [AI / ML] tool that is monetizable. We wanted to make sure that we are sinking in our investment in terms of time and money into something that will sweat, not something that looks sexy but means nothing.”