AT&T transforms enterprise order management with ServiceNow

Enterprise customers increasingly expect communications service providers (CSPs) to quickly and efficiently process even the most complex orders, which is why AT&T’s overhaul of its order management systems (OM) is a major part of its wider digital transformation program. “Order management is an important part of a prime business goal we’re trying to achieve – making that whole OSS/BSS not be the long pole on the tent when it comes to how fast we can deliver something to market,” says Scott Baker, Lead-Solution Architect, AT&T Corporate ServiceNow Centre of Excellence. AT&T is modernizing its entire enterprise service delivery organization, from the point of sales and order processing, through to switching on the service with the customer. Until recently AT&T was using mainly OM systems that had developed organically around the requirements of whichever product a team was trying to launch at a given time. “You had a very large number of systems with overlapping capabilities whose implementation were specific to the product,” explains Baker. “This led to a lot of complex orchestration and a lot of folks having to ‘swivel chair’ between multiple platforms depending on what kind of order came in through the door.”

A single view

AT&T is using ServiceNow’s orchestration software to link disparate data sets and provide a single view of an enterprise customer’s products and services and locations. The CSP is still in the early days of rolling out the solution, but it is hoping to achieve much higher levels of workflow consistency and automation when it comes to modelling products. “The first products haven’t gone live yet, but if we get it right then the entire data model in the SaaS [software-as-a-service] platforms comes to life,” Baker says. “You know exactly what you need to do, and there’s not much question around how you model products.” One of the advantages of working with ServiceNow is its compliance with TM Forum Open APIs. “ServiceNow provided the ability to orchestrate in a way that was product agnostic. What’s been nice is that TM Forum’s Open APIs and the entire framework around them provide a common vocabulary to talk about things across different vendors,” says Baker. “We are now in the midst of designing our first fully TM Forum-compliant flows all the way from the sales and processes to delivering to the customer.” AT&T is using TM Forum’s Product Catalog API to help disentangle the way it markets and sells products from the technical delivery. “That model is becoming very central to the transformation, to the point where we’re telling architects, ‘I don’t care if it’s in sales delivery or assurance -- start with the product catalog’,” explains Baker. Baker is keen to avoid the cost and complexity that comes with customization. “We have a tight partnership with ServiceNow, and we are sticking to one of our main goals which is to use ServiceNow straight out of the box.” As the transformation project progresses, AT&T seeks to further reduce the expense of supporting applications. “Our goal is to rationalize a large number of applications as our inventory moves into ServiceNow natively,” Baker explains. “As it moves into that data model natively then literally hundreds of applications that have pockets of inventory get collapsed into it and your total bill goes down as a result,” he says. “Moving the data is the easy part. The hard part is disentangling the spider webs each of those applications has with other applications.”

Handing development to business teams

The move to ServiceNow’s cloud-based platform also makes it easier for AT&T’s customer-facing business teams to quickly develop new products and thereby reduce pressure on the IT department. “You don’t necessarily require a pro-coder to do a product implementation,” says Baker. “Instead, you can use low code development to push what would have been hardcore development work out of IT and into the business where the people know the customer requirements better.” AT&T has found it simpler to initially open product development to the business teams that deal with the least automated services. “It is always easier to start with least automated parts as they are the most self-contained and have the fewest dependencies and tentacles into other systems,” according to Baker. “One of the harder problems we have from a transformation perspective is figuring out how managers balance the workload across different workstreams that don’t talk to one another.”

Laying the foundations

Before embarking on any OM transformation Baker recommends that CSPs establish which core data they need to know about their customers and their services. “How do you commonly define a customer across all your platforms? How do you commonly define a customer contact? How do you define inventory? Pulling all that together is a basic requirement for the transformation to any of these platforms and it is something we all need to do anyway,” he says, adding that project teams have struggled when they have tried to skip this step. Not every challenge is purely technical – or addressed by every API today. “As we implement TM Forum Product Order models, the one thing we’re currently having to deal with is how we use TM Forum APIs and data models to codify more complex relationships with multiple orders or multiple parts of an order that may not necessarily be driven from the technical catalog – things that are related around either broad network design, or multi-state, multi-country network design around customer preferences,” says Baker. “Or simply because we can’t install at a site because the customer hasn’t finished building it or we have no certificate of occupancy.” In the latter instance, for example, APIs assume data exists when it does not, an issue that AT&T is working with TM Forum to address.

Transformation needs people

A transformation program depends on employee support, which comes in part from ensuring that new systems quickly help them perform better, rather than hampering their work. “We could have the best IT strategy in the world, and it is meaningless if the business pushes back and won’t use it,” says Baker, who recommends starting an OM transformation from the sales end of the workflow. “Everybody will have their wants in the sub-groups of a business unit, but the logical way to approach it is to start with the sales side and move back towards provisioning,” he explains. “Aligning projects in this way makes for a much more seamless transition for the centers that still have to do their day-to-day business during the transition.”