Login
Register
Using TM Forum’s Digital Maturity Model, China Unicom built an digital index system harnessing AI to monitor and optimize key areas of digital transformation and digital operations.
Annie Turner
China Unicom's AI-powered digital index progresses its transformation
China Unicom was keen to leverage technologies including 5G, big data, cloud computing, AI and other digital enablers, for its own internal use and to power the services it offers to customers and ecosystem partners. It was particularly focused on the transformation of three areas: However, it faced a number of challenges. The operator had no defined goals and a lack of usable data to help it define those goals and their feasibility. It also lacked operational support for the transformation, such as closed-loop mechanisms to assess the formulation of the strategy’s objectives and their feasibility, then assess their progress and constantly improve the processes.
To address these issues, China Unicom created the IT Digital Index System (IDIS) drawing on TM Forum’s Digital Maturity Model and its own vision for digital transformation. The Digital Maturity Model has five dimensions, customer, strategy, technology, operations and culture, each of which has a number of aspects that in turn are broken down into criteria against which organizations can test their digital maturity. The operator also used some of the Forum’s guidebooks and best practices to help it fully leverage the Digital Maturity Model, including: Developing the IDIS To ensure that the measures and tasks derived by breaking down the strategy were scientific and feasible, China Unicom set up teams of experts from all the fields across the group. They came up with objectives based on the development status of the IT across the company measured against the strategic goals and what was needed to realize them. The operator also set up virtual expert teams, who could be accessed on demand to solve problems, to gain full value from its pool of talent. This enabled the operator to decompose strategic initiatives and tasks, layer by layer, to help organize the group’s overall IT operations. Critically, it helped the teams address how to implement the strategy captured in IDIS in the existing organization, business and IT fields. IDIS created an IT digital index (metric) for each IT domain and the dimensions within them by quantifying its IT capabilities in every unit, from headquarters, to provincial offices and subsidiaries.
The key to the success of the whole project is harnessing data from across China Unicom’s entire IT estate using analytics and AI, machine learning, deep learning and neural networks. The analytics and AI fuel two key functions: the intelligent, dynamic evaluation model and intelligent data analysis.
The IDIS dynamically adjusts each index and its weighting in real time, as the IT digitalization process advances. It has three first-level indexes, 12 second level ones and 28 third-level quantifying indexes. The third level ones are created by weighted calculations to form the second-level index, which feeds back into the third-level and recursively comes up with the index for each IT unit in the company. AI’s "learning" is done via a closed-loop management and operation system for IT to evolve functions like monitoring strategy objectives and their implementation, to identifying and solving problems. In this way China Unicom can coordinate the development of IT and control the transformation, improve IT’s capabilities and efficiency, and provide a basis for making informed decisions about resource allocation. Benchmarks were created to help and promote the coordinated developments with subsidiaries. At the same time, the IDIS constantly improves the effectiveness of the knowledge base on which the evaluation model relies and continuously updates it using AI algorithms, which ‘learn’ and adapt their behavior from what they learn, enabled by neural networking.
The IDIS also built an intelligent data analysis framework, providing analytic capabilities like clustering, multi- and cross-dimensional analysis, and correlation analysis. The mined data and AI also helped China Unicom overcome implementation challenges, to ensure the transformation resulted in lean operations, in three main ways: Once the strategic tasks were defined, adaptive teams were put in place with responsibility for specific aspects of implementation. Then closed-loop mechanisms ensured the implementations delivered on their objectives from execution to review.
This pioneering approach to transformation delivered many business benefits to China Unicom. They include: With the help of TM Forum, China Unicom intends to explore further the organizational innovation model for digital enterprises with partners, and to contribute its transformation experience to help construct a global ecosystem of major international operators.
