Telcos collaborate to scale the benefits of AIOps
The AIOps Catalyst team’s work has resulted in a new collaborative workstream, with a two-pronged approach, focused around the topic within TM Forum.
14 Jan 2020
Telcos collaborate to scale the benefits of AIOps
The AIOps Catalyst team’s work has resulted in a new collaborative workstream focused around the topic within TM Forum.
Artificial intelligence (AI) offers huge opportunities for communications service providers (CSPs) to do things better, faster and cheaper.
In fact, they have no choice but to introduce AI into operations and business processes due to growing complexity and the sheer volume of data and transactions.
However, as well as delivering huge benefits, the introduction of AI also creates new challenges relating to the management of services and processes.
A TM Forum Catalyst team is taking a two-pronged approach, tackling both these areas simultaneously to ensure CSPs – and their customers – reap the rewards of AI.
The AI for IT & Network Operations (AIOps) Catalyst project recently completed its third phase with participation from 12 companies – including seven leading CSPs – collectively representing over 1.5 billion customers. This highlights the importance of AI to the telecoms industry.
As well as adding new use cases to address business needs, the latest iteration of the work also saw the launch of a new collaboration workstream focused on AIOps within TM Forum’s AI program. The workstream will focus on redesigning operations management processes so that they are able to cope with the use of AI at scale.
The Catalyst champions – who set the challenge and goals – are China Telecom, China Mobile, China Unicom, KDDI Research, PCCW/Hong Kong Telecommunications (HKT), Smart Communications and Telefonica Deutschland. The participants, who each provide a piece of the solution puzzle, are BOCO Inter-telecom, BONC, Huawei, Si-Tech and Tech Mahindra.
Michael Yue, A/SVP Engineering, HKT, explained the importance of AIOps to his company and the benefits of taking part in the Catalyst: “By participating in the TM Forum AIOps joint innovation project with our trusted technology partners, HKT aims to accelerate digital transformation. We are paving the way to deepen customer relationships and enhance customer engagement through the provision of a full suite of solutions to meet the requirements of enterprise and SME customers to assist their business transformation. The inspiration from TM Forum assets facilitates the formulation of strategic technology directives to meet the challenges ahead.”
The team has now developed eight use cases addressing the various business needs presented by the CSP champions. These cut across customer experience, quality of service, business performance and efficiency, and include:
Artificial intelligence (AI) offers huge opportunities for communications service providers (CSPs) to do things better, faster and cheaper.
In fact, they have no choice but to introduce AI into operations and business processes due to growing complexity and the sheer volume of data and transactions.
However, as well as delivering huge benefits, the introduction of AI also creates new challenges relating to the management of services and processes.
A TM Forum Catalyst team is taking a two-pronged approach, tackling both these areas simultaneously to ensure CSPs – and their customers – reap the rewards of AI.
Industry priorities
The AI for IT & Network Operations (AIOps) Catalyst project recently completed its third phase with participation from 12 companies – including seven leading CSPs – collectively representing over 1.5 billion customers. This highlights the importance of AI to the telecoms industry.
As well as adding new use cases to address business needs, the latest iteration of the work also saw the launch of a new collaboration workstream focused on AIOps within TM Forum’s AI program. The workstream will focus on redesigning operations management processes so that they are able to cope with the use of AI at scale.
The Catalyst champions – who set the challenge and goals – are China Telecom, China Mobile, China Unicom, KDDI Research, PCCW/Hong Kong Telecommunications (HKT), Smart Communications and Telefonica Deutschland. The participants, who each provide a piece of the solution puzzle, are BOCO Inter-telecom, BONC, Huawei, Si-Tech and Tech Mahindra.
Michael Yue, A/SVP Engineering, HKT, explained the importance of AIOps to his company and the benefits of taking part in the Catalyst: “By participating in the TM Forum AIOps joint innovation project with our trusted technology partners, HKT aims to accelerate digital transformation. We are paving the way to deepen customer relationships and enhance customer engagement through the provision of a full suite of solutions to meet the requirements of enterprise and SME customers to assist their business transformation. The inspiration from TM Forum assets facilitates the formulation of strategic technology directives to meet the challenges ahead.”
New AIOps use cases
The team has now developed eight use cases addressing the various business needs presented by the CSP champions. These cut across customer experience, quality of service, business performance and efficiency, and include:
- Predicting and preventing poor customer experience
- Predicting churn and using proactive techniques to retain customers
- Accurately monitoring service levels
- Identifying potential faults and their root causes in 5G networks before the issues generate impacts or outages
- Preventing customer complaints
- Performing preventive maintenance activities
- Deploying an intelligent operations and maintenance (O&M) framework for home broadband services
- Establishing closed-loop service assurance to continuously improve service quality and O&M efficiency
Andrea Igl, Head of Programme, Tech Mahindra, said: “We have developed a variety of use cases to cover the burning business requirements across network and IT, as well as all the processes. We also made sure we cover all relevant aspects for future 5G use case adoption.”
Michael Yue, A/SVP Engineering, HKT, added: “With added intelligence to process ‘network-related’ trouble tickets created by customer complaints to discover the potential users with similar dissatisfied network experience and prioritise the network improvement and customer care actions, it thereby helps prevent unhappy customers from becoming complaining customers.”
In limited trials, the team has already proved the business benefits of an AIOps approach – achieving, for example, a 10-15% reduction in customer complaints; 30% reduction in customer churn; NPS increase of 10-15 points; 20% reduction in number of network incidents; 20% increase in resolution time; 60% reduction in alarms; 30% reduction in order failures; 10% reduction in site visits; and 30% reduction in manual interventions.
With results such as these, there’s no doubt that to compete, telcos must implement AI. First, they must ready their systems and processes.
Luca Varvello, ICT Senior Consultant, Huawei, said: “On one hand, AI deployment in operations brings tremendous opportunity to improve CSPs’ business services and processes. On the other hand, it also creates the challenge to operate systems and processes differently.”
A 2019 TM Forum report, AI and its pivotal role in transforming operations, concluded that because: “AI is so integral to every CSPs’ success, it is a prime candidate for cross-industry collaboration to create standards, models and best practices by sharing knowledge, skills and experience.”
The new AIOps workstream, inspired by the work of the Catalyst team, will identify – and ultimately work to plug -- the operational and process gaps between traditional operations and AIOps
“The mission of the AIOps workgroup is to perform a deep process assessment, gap analysis and redesign of the operations processes in order to prepare them to support AI at scale in large CSPs operations, enabling operations teams, process owners and business users to exploit AI safely and properly maximizing benefits, mitigating risks and ensuring the appropriate level of quality,” said Varvello.
Zhang Ke, Senior PM, China Telecom, noted how these areas are important to his company’s strategy: “China Telecom participated in the three phases of the AIOps project, and has set up an AIOps research group with the three major operators and outstanding vendors in China. China Telecom will continue to promote the synergy between the Catalyst project and the collaboration program on industry standards, sharing the latest 5G operations experiences and improving AI-enabled network management”.
The Catalyst team has already won an award at TM Forum’s Digital Transformation World 2019 event for its Outstanding Contribution to TM Forum Assets and will build on this through the collaborative work.
The deliverables from the workstream will include: identifying the gaps between traditional software and AI software; establishing a set of guidelines and principles to rethink the operations processes; redesigning the deployment and production stages of the software and service lifecycle; and providing concrete use cases and examples of these processes being implemented in real operations.
Get involved in the new workstream.
Michael Yue, A/SVP Engineering, HKT, added: “With added intelligence to process ‘network-related’ trouble tickets created by customer complaints to discover the potential users with similar dissatisfied network experience and prioritise the network improvement and customer care actions, it thereby helps prevent unhappy customers from becoming complaining customers.”
In limited trials, the team has already proved the business benefits of an AIOps approach – achieving, for example, a 10-15% reduction in customer complaints; 30% reduction in customer churn; NPS increase of 10-15 points; 20% reduction in number of network incidents; 20% increase in resolution time; 60% reduction in alarms; 30% reduction in order failures; 10% reduction in site visits; and 30% reduction in manual interventions.
Closing the gaps
With results such as these, there’s no doubt that to compete, telcos must implement AI. First, they must ready their systems and processes.
Luca Varvello, ICT Senior Consultant, Huawei, said: “On one hand, AI deployment in operations brings tremendous opportunity to improve CSPs’ business services and processes. On the other hand, it also creates the challenge to operate systems and processes differently.”
A 2019 TM Forum report, AI and its pivotal role in transforming operations, concluded that because: “AI is so integral to every CSPs’ success, it is a prime candidate for cross-industry collaboration to create standards, models and best practices by sharing knowledge, skills and experience.”
The new AIOps workstream, inspired by the work of the Catalyst team, will identify – and ultimately work to plug -- the operational and process gaps between traditional operations and AIOps
“The mission of the AIOps workgroup is to perform a deep process assessment, gap analysis and redesign of the operations processes in order to prepare them to support AI at scale in large CSPs operations, enabling operations teams, process owners and business users to exploit AI safely and properly maximizing benefits, mitigating risks and ensuring the appropriate level of quality,” said Varvello.
Zhang Ke, Senior PM, China Telecom, noted how these areas are important to his company’s strategy: “China Telecom participated in the three phases of the AIOps project, and has set up an AIOps research group with the three major operators and outstanding vendors in China. China Telecom will continue to promote the synergy between the Catalyst project and the collaboration program on industry standards, sharing the latest 5G operations experiences and improving AI-enabled network management”.
The Catalyst team has already won an award at TM Forum’s Digital Transformation World 2019 event for its Outstanding Contribution to TM Forum Assets and will build on this through the collaborative work.
The deliverables from the workstream will include: identifying the gaps between traditional software and AI software; establishing a set of guidelines and principles to rethink the operations processes; redesigning the deployment and production stages of the software and service lifecycle; and providing concrete use cases and examples of these processes being implemented in real operations.
Get involved in the new workstream.
