DTW (Digital Transformation World)
The next step in becoming a digital business: Look inward
This Digital Transformation World panel offered diverse perspectives, but a common view emerged: Telecom culture has to change.
23 May 2019
The next step in becoming a digital business: Look inward
It is not as if the diverse panel at TM Forum’s Digital Transformation World last week talked past each other while discussing what it will take for communications service providers (CSPs) to become digital operators by the year 2025, but they came at the challenge from different perspectives. One common view emerged, however, around culture: Telecom culture has to change.
Led by Susan Welsh de Grimaldo, Director of Service Provider Strategies, Global Wireless Practice at Strategy Analytics, panelists from Wind Tre, Telus Digital, IBM, McKinsey Digital and Apigate offered their perspectives on the changes required in technology, processes, innovation strategy and culture for CSPs to become not just digital operators, but digital businesses, which according to a loose consensus among the group means focusing on providing a digital experience for customers, employees, partners and operational practices across the company.
Harry McIntosh, Vice President of Telus Digital, said Telus’ success in recent years has been due in large part to putting customers and employees first and adopting a philosophy that culture and technology go hand in hand.
Telus defines “digital” as a way of working across channels, a synonym for the pace of change occurring across business due to the rapid adoption of technology. The company established a “digital team” within the organization to drive the idea into its DNA. To get the right talent, Telus had to hire from the outside, which proved challenging as creative digital thinkers had little desire to work in a telco environment.
The digital team’s goal is to represent the customer’s voice within the organization. This requires a corporate culture that can resist “getting eaten by the machine of the old school.” The team needed its own new set of processes and a new architecture that would simplify Telus’ path to production and deliver customer value with velocity.
For this, the company created a set of tools, technologies and practices called the Digital Telus Platform, which consists of a six-layer architecture, technology, processes, practices, governance, standards, program management and people and has cultural implications.
Led by Susan Welsh de Grimaldo, Director of Service Provider Strategies, Global Wireless Practice at Strategy Analytics, panelists from Wind Tre, Telus Digital, IBM, McKinsey Digital and Apigate offered their perspectives on the changes required in technology, processes, innovation strategy and culture for CSPs to become not just digital operators, but digital businesses, which according to a loose consensus among the group means focusing on providing a digital experience for customers, employees, partners and operational practices across the company.
Harry McIntosh, Vice President of Telus Digital, said Telus’ success in recent years has been due in large part to putting customers and employees first and adopting a philosophy that culture and technology go hand in hand.
“Every technology decision we make is coupled with a cultural one,” he said.
Defining digital
Telus defines “digital” as a way of working across channels, a synonym for the pace of change occurring across business due to the rapid adoption of technology. The company established a “digital team” within the organization to drive the idea into its DNA. To get the right talent, Telus had to hire from the outside, which proved challenging as creative digital thinkers had little desire to work in a telco environment.
The digital team’s goal is to represent the customer’s voice within the organization. This requires a corporate culture that can resist “getting eaten by the machine of the old school.” The team needed its own new set of processes and a new architecture that would simplify Telus’ path to production and deliver customer value with velocity.
For this, the company created a set of tools, technologies and practices called the Digital Telus Platform, which consists of a six-layer architecture, technology, processes, practices, governance, standards, program management and people and has cultural implications.
The Digital Telus Platform was designed to reduce the cost and time to build new customer experiences. The concept, McIntosh said, is not to become a great telco, but a great company no matter what comes next. To measure success, Telus does not look at digital key performance indicators (KPIs), but business KPIs.
Another measure of success, said Ruben Schaubroeck, Senior Partner at McKinsey Digital, is how a CSP stacks up not against other CSPs but against new digitally native competitors. Schaubroeck agrees that cultural change is the biggest part of the journey to be more digital and data oriented. Talent that can challenge the organization, he said, can deliver a much-needed new perspective. However, he warned that talent at the technology level alone will not fix the problem for CSPs needing to change.
In a recent article outlining the building blocks telcos need to create their digital-and-analytics DNA, Schaubroeck said that telcos need to rewire themselves to work in Agile ways and make data-driven decisions to keep up with customers’ increasing demands for simple digital experiences.
Marisa Viveros, Vice President Strategy & Solutions for Telecom Media & Entertainment at IBM, said there are three dimensions to digital transformation: experience, natural language processing, and a digital interface for employees to interact with each other and customers. She added a fourth dimension which is reinventing the network to be more agile and flexible.
Another measure of success, said Ruben Schaubroeck, Senior Partner at McKinsey Digital, is how a CSP stacks up not against other CSPs but against new digitally native competitors. Schaubroeck agrees that cultural change is the biggest part of the journey to be more digital and data oriented. Talent that can challenge the organization, he said, can deliver a much-needed new perspective. However, he warned that talent at the technology level alone will not fix the problem for CSPs needing to change.
“Companies need top-team transformation too,” Schaubroeck said. “If you cannot explain the shareholder value [of digital transformation] in the next five years, you can never get the buy-in to change.”
In a recent article outlining the building blocks telcos need to create their digital-and-analytics DNA, Schaubroeck said that telcos need to rewire themselves to work in Agile ways and make data-driven decisions to keep up with customers’ increasing demands for simple digital experiences.
Technology can help
Marisa Viveros, Vice President Strategy & Solutions for Telecom Media & Entertainment at IBM, said there are three dimensions to digital transformation: experience, natural language processing, and a digital interface for employees to interact with each other and customers. She added a fourth dimension which is reinventing the network to be more agile and flexible.
Viveros was more bullish than other panelists on technology’s ability to digitally transform he CSP. She cited work IBM has done with Vodafone incorporating security, AI and co-creation. This has helped the CSP address the business-to-business market, which she sees as the target for digital CSPs.
Viveros added that by 2020 some CSPs may lose as much as 40% of their workforce, pushing CTOs to mandate the use of AI and machine learning in order to process all the data needed to get an accurate view of the business.
Rob Visser, CIO at Italian integrated services provider Wind Tre, emphasized people over technology, saying, “If you have great technology but untrained people, you get poor results. If you have poor technology but great people, you can still get great results.”
He prioritizes people, process and then technology, in that order. Visser said additionally that the technology must be agile and discounted the focus on AI and machine learning.
Viveros said that while focus on individual talent is important, the big contribution from people over technology is their ability to collaborate, using both skills and technology. IBM has set up project competitions through which teams vie for continued approval of projects.
“We created a whole new environment with collaboration among 350,000 people,” she explained. Some of that collaboration was applied to the previously mentioned Vodafone project.
It will be important for CSPs to measure their progress along the way not only to stay focused on transformation but also to recognize when they have arrived at their destination. Some of the characteristics CSPs need to adopt become digital operators, according to the panel include:
Venura Mendis, CTO of Apigate, said digital CSPs need to think more like internet companies and use more open source software. The model of innovation emanating from the vendor community is outdated, he said, adding that a more modular approach to building support software is allowing CSPs to innovate on their own, if they so choose.
Viveros added that by 2020 some CSPs may lose as much as 40% of their workforce, pushing CTOs to mandate the use of AI and machine learning in order to process all the data needed to get an accurate view of the business.
People are key
Rob Visser, CIO at Italian integrated services provider Wind Tre, emphasized people over technology, saying, “If you have great technology but untrained people, you get poor results. If you have poor technology but great people, you can still get great results.”
He prioritizes people, process and then technology, in that order. Visser said additionally that the technology must be agile and discounted the focus on AI and machine learning.
“Digital is not a strategy – it is not a goal,” he said. “It is a means. AI and machine learning are marketing terms. We need to invest in data scientists. That is the real work. It is not talking about AI.”
Viveros said that while focus on individual talent is important, the big contribution from people over technology is their ability to collaborate, using both skills and technology. IBM has set up project competitions through which teams vie for continued approval of projects.
“We created a whole new environment with collaboration among 350,000 people,” she explained. Some of that collaboration was applied to the previously mentioned Vodafone project.
It will be important for CSPs to measure their progress along the way not only to stay focused on transformation but also to recognize when they have arrived at their destination. Some of the characteristics CSPs need to adopt become digital operators, according to the panel include:
- Elimination of silos
- Fast delivery of new services for vertical industries
- An organization structured on value streams, where everybody flows toward the same mission
- Happy customers
- Happy employees
- Better talent
Venura Mendis, CTO of Apigate, said digital CSPs need to think more like internet companies and use more open source software. The model of innovation emanating from the vendor community is outdated, he said, adding that a more modular approach to building support software is allowing CSPs to innovate on their own, if they so choose.
