Deutsche Telekom uses TM Forum Open APIs for European unification

Deutsche Telekom’s (DT’s) rapid deployment of application program interfaces (APIs) is a core competency that all operators can benefit from. The company has been using TM Forum Open APIs to meet a big business initiative to transform their complex back-end systems, and introduce one single mobile application (OneApp) across Europe where previously each country had its own app, all with differing architectural approaches and larger maintenance costs.

To do this, DT deployed 17 Open APIs in five markets: Poland, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary and Croatia. Company execs say they were able to save “a hell of a lot of time” by using APIs that already exist rather than creating them from scratch. They were able to cut the time in half, and now that the APIs and ways of working are established, future projects are predicted to see the same, if not better results. Today, just one year after starting the project more than 1 million customers are using OneApp, and it has the highest Playstore rating ever in T-Mobile Czech with 4+ stars.

Dominik Periškić, Director of IT System Integration and OSS at DT’s Croatian office, is in charge of guiding what the company’s Harmonized API Layer (HAL) project as Project Director. In Croatian Telekom he has led several complex projects with key elements of transformation and consolidation of IT landscapes.

DT built the HAL framework for OneApp to be used for all future front-end solutions (self-care, e-commerce, etc.) in DT national companies. HAL is DT’s framework/specification for APIs exposed to front-end systems and is based on Open API standards from TM Forum.

The venture

DT has subsidiaries all over the world, but this particular business initiative was focused on many of the company’s European businesses. Not only did the company want a consistent, self-service application for customers to use across Europe, but they also wanted the technology used to be part of DT’s wider purpose to become a truly agile organization, able to quickly meet business and consumer needs. The APIs can be exposed externally so that partners can connect more easily to the telco operational and business support system (OSS/BSS) environment.

Eva Ulicevic, Senior Vice President – EU IT Steering, DT, states: “For a long time we tried to digitalize the company through BSS transformation, which consumed significant company resource and lasted for years. With this new approach we were able to significantly reduce time to market for the IT delivery of complex programs and bring significant business value in just a few months.
For EU IT, it was a starting point for effective transformation of existing telco IT. New EU IT architecture (EIRA) is built around HAL which allows us to fully embrace new technologies and ways of working, also allowing us to securely delivery of business priorities.”

Here’s what the journey looked like:

• The story began locally with Periškić’s team of four to five developers in Croatia, with the goals of creating the app, alongside decoupling front-end systems from various complex back-end environments.
• They wanted to build two APIs that could be reused later, and they wanted some kind of framework to get these done as quickly and as efficiently within DT’s complex IT environment.
• The whole project, from building the central specifications and user stories, and then the local implementations, took around a year.
• The specification part was about three to four months, followed by local implementations (per country).
• Within around four months, the team built 400 user stories (simplified descriptions requirements) and swagger files with examples to all of the countries.
• The team made some minor modifications during the development phase (mostly clarifications).
• Then, they started a local development by aligning with local technologies.

Why TM Forum APIs

The team realized that if they created their own APIs, they would be completely unique, and many of DT’s vendors and partners just wouldn’t have the time and resources available to align themselves with these new standards.

Periškić and his team decided to work in alignment with TM Forum’s API initiative. The company already had a history with the Forum, having used its adopted standards, including the Business Process Framework (eTOM) and Information Framework (SID), in various countries.

“We are recognizing TM Forum as central place for establishing these kind of frameworks in telco world,” he said. “If we found anything that could be worked on, such as adapting the APIs to our own specific telco needs, we were more than happy to collaborate with TM Forum to discuss and potentially embed these improvements.”

Challenges

Alongside the usual operational issues of departmental politics, discussing development across time zones and getting approvals at various levels, further challenges presented themselves:

Alignment

A challenge, common in many transformation projects, was the alignment of the business and technical teams. In the old ways of working – the waterfall method – all business requirements were defined, and after everything was done the technical teams started the development. With this project, DT used an Agile sprint approach, where a country’s local business and the central team in Germany jointly defined the requirements for the API specifications. While the first set of requirements were being developed the second set were being aligned.

Governance

At present the company has a governance plan which it is implementing it in all countries that are part of this initiative. There is no central API management platform; the approach being taken here is that different countries have autonomy over which management platform they use. It was an easier approach to make universal specifications and leave each country to decide how to implement them, particularly because the APIs were connecting to lots of different legacy systems and it would be difficult to make one central implementation.

However DT is building a central competence center for APIs to be stationed in Croatia to support continued development and local implementations, but also be a part of centrally driven new initiatives and functionalities for other projects in the future.

Even though the setup of the governance for the OneApp program was not in the best possible place due to time limits, the team is catching up now and presenting the centrally guided governance to everyone in the initiative. For OneApp, the first priority was to develop a solution design, a technology design and to build the user stories (of which there are 400).

Culture

Like other organizations its size, DT is a traditional telecom organization where less-agile rules and mindsets are common. But the team needed to be agile.

“We needed to be able to cooperate to be transparent, which is not the easiest thing to tell people who are not used to working that way,” Periškić said. “And we had to convince a lot of different people in different countries to adapt to this way of working.”
He took the approach of introducing things from his own perspective:
“When you start from the ‘me’ approach, you can get everyone on board that way. If I say ‘I will be transparent, I will communicate what I’m doing, I will not be ashamed to make any mistakes’ it sets a good precedent as to the way you’re working.”

Periškić found that though there were tough situations and political battles, transparency eased this process and helped to breed acceptance throughout the project.

The product

The Open APIs covered all aspects of the DT apps with the exception of two APIs that DT created itself, an onboarding and a profile API:

Here’s a list of APIs created for minimum viable product of the app program (note that the minimum viable product for HAL contains 17 APIs, while this list covers a wider scope):

• Activation and configuration
• Communication
• Privacy Management
• Customer Bill Management
• Customer Management
• Document Management
• Onboarding
• Party Management
• Payment Management
• Payment Methods
• Prepay Balance Management
• Product Catalog Management
• Product Inventory
• Product Ordering Management
• Profile Management
• Promotion
• User Roles and Permissions
• Shipment Tracking Management
• Trouble Ticket
• Usage Consumption
• Usage Management

The way forward

OneApp is fully functional in five countries, with 1 million active users, and the number is increasing daily. The second wave in terms of releasing the app is in implementation, which means HAL (the 17 harmonized APIs) have since been developed in Romania, Macedonia and Montenegro.

Now, where there is one single area that decouples and integrates front-end systems with various back-ends systems, DT predicts it will save a lot of money in operating costs as the company no longer has to maintain different interfaces and integration platforms.

What’s more, the company predicts a shorter time to market in the future using these standardized and solid interfaces, as they that can be widely reused for various propositions and functions. Periškić exaplains:

“If you want to introduce one mobile application with one single code, the only way to do this is if you have a middle layer with the same APIs in all those countries. This is the only way you can actually hide the complexity of the whole OSS/BSS landscape in all those countries. Standardization makes it easier on the front end because you don’t have to build the specific code for each of those countries.”

The company has already started other initiatives, like the eCommerce portal , which is a complete eCommerce portal for fixed and mobile customers based on the HAL.