TELUS champions platform thinking to transform a century-old telco

• Who: TELUS
• What: Built an open, transparent digital platform with an ecosystem of tools, technologies and practices that simplify the path to production, making it easier for teams to deliver value to customers
• How: Close collaboration with TM Forum, including use of the Forum’s Open APIs, part of TM Forum’s Open Digital Framework
• Results: 134,000 hours (around $9.1 million) of development and designer time saved in 2018; 4x speed to market; simplified IT integration efforts; reduced code-shipping costs from a multi-day human effort to a 12-minute script

Plenty of telcos talk about "going digital" and building a digital platform, but Canada’s TELUS is more than just talk – it's actually done it. The TELUS Digital Platform is an ecosystem of tools, technologies and practices that simplify the path to production, making it easier for teams to deliver value to customers. TELUS says its digital ecosystem encompasses design, content, intelligence, application program interfaces (APIs) and delivery enablement. Like most telcos that attempt digital transformation, TELUS faced formidable challenges to develop its digital platform. The secret to overcoming the challenges lay in a fully open, transparent approach to the project – almost the exact opposite of the traditional telco way of doing things. Key to the platform’s success stemmed from the practices and community surrounding it.

Facing reality

The initial decision to develop a digital platform came from the simple reality that it was the cornerstone to embarking on a digital transformation as a competitive necessity, explains Elaine Oei, Director of Digital Platform and Products, TELUS. “Customer expectations of what is the new normal for digital experiences increased rapidly as they interacted daily with the likes of Netflix, Spotify, Amazon, Instagram, Facebook, not to mention the organization's increasing need to embed digital experiences into day-to-day operations,” Oei says. “We needed to establish standardization across our ecosystem of technologies, tools and practices to ensure we could deliver outcomes quickly with quality and confidence to meet the ever changing demands of our customers for personal, connected, and contextual experiences.” One challenge the team at TELUS Digital faced early on – and a problem that likely sounds familiar to many organizations undertaking a similar project – was that teams were working in silos, which was resulting in fractured customer experiences and inefficiencies. To combat this, the team came up with the idea of appointing ambassadors across the organization who were in charge of ensuring a consistent experience for digital platform and ecosystem users, as well as voting on who was responsible for certain tasks, voting on the quality of member contributions, and suggesting requirements for improving contributions.

Open source for transparency

TELUS Digital also decided to embrace an open-source approach to evolving the digital platform with full transparency. Indeed, key components of the platform, including the entire reference architecture and TELUS design system, were fully evolved in the public domain. That may sound like an approach that goes against the traditional telco grain, but Oei credits the decision in part to the fact that the operator collaborated with TM Forum to help influence the TELUS Digital Platform early on. Between 2017 and 2018, two cohorts of almost 50 developers, product owners and analysts attended TM Forum training and became certified through the Forum’s Open API Fundamentals module. The company has championed TM Forum Open APIs as a ‘North Star’ for the digital platform. The certification process was the team’s first introduction to TM Forum standards and informed TELUS’ approach to developing and evolving the digital platform. “Through open-source collaboration and inspiration from TM Forum, the TELUS Digital Platform enables a strong developer community that enables contributions to quickly embed improvements daily,” Oei says. To be sure, she admits, “Not all of our intellectual property is fully transparent – specifics of business logic are held private.” However, she adds, “Most of our knowledge is commonplace and shared outside of the telco space, so there is very little risk in giving back to the open source community.”

Evolving the platform

The open-source approach also enabled TELUS to tightly interlock the platform’s evolution with TM Forum standards and best practices. The team analyzed the current TELUS ecosystem and conducted a gap analysis based on the TM Forum Open APIs model as a target state.

Insights gleaned from TM Forum standards have directly influenced initiatives to further evolve the platform, such as an API gateway modernization project that aims to improve the operator’s in-house API gateway solution. TELUS has also launched an effort to modernize its API documentation portal to support Open API standard documentation, mock-ups and testing capabilities in order to drastically improve the developer experience. “This has a double benefit of improving our speed to market and improving capital efficiency for product development,” Oei explains. “Ultimately, we unlock capabilities and new experiences for customers at a faster pace.”

Improving speed to market

TELUS contends that the digital platform – which powers 259 apps – has “revolutionized how our teams work and go to market.” That may sound like hyperbole, but the company does offer a plethora of metrics to make the case that, revolutionary or not, the platform has vastly improved operations.

The project has also enabled TELUS to contribute three code contributions back to the TM Forum community, with at least eight more on the way. And it's not done yet. Moving forward, Oei says, TELUS will continue to refactor its API catalog based on Open APIs. It also plans to invest in service-mesh capabilities that enable it to monitor API dependencies, and support and promote GraphQL (a query language for APIs), whichwill enable developers to create custom schemas to fetch data from multiple APIs. “These future-focused efforts inspired by TM Forum will further increase our responsiveness and performance,” she says. “Over the next three years, the anticipated benefits of refactoring APIs and having an open API ecosystem using TM Forum’s specifications is $3.6 million.”