Making the Complex Simple: Operations in Digital Time

Charles Darwin once said that it’s not necessarily the strongest species that survive: it’s the ones that adapt best to a changing environment. It’s true in nature as well as in business, especially when you consider that 52 percent of the firms listed on the Fortune 500 since 2000 have gone out of business.

Those that have adapted to today’s realities, such as over-the-top (OTT) service providers, are doing quite well. Netflix, for example, has seen its share price climb by 500 percent since 2013. Over that same period, the share price of traditional communication service providers (CSPs) has grown by just a couple of percentage points. Why? Because their established operating models just aren’t suited to digital time.

Why you need to operate in digital time

In my previous article, I introduced what we at Nokia call “digital time” — how digital technologies are being used in a faster, bolder and more intelligent way to keep pace in a world where everything must be immediate and highly intuitive.

Operating in digital time is crucial for CSPs anywhere in the world facing heavy competition from OTT providers and web-scale companies. It’s what will allow them to make better use of each moment, leading to big improvements in efficiency and productivity.

It’s those types of improvements that will help them get their share of the $3.9 trillion in revenues expected to be generated by the Internet of Things, new digital service models and other hyperconnected technologies by 2025. But it’s going to be very hard to seize any part of that opportunity when complex, siloed legacy systems are preventing them from responding to customer needs in digital time.

For CSPs, the key to adapting and surviving is to make complex operations simpler and more efficient through end-to-end automation and intelligence.

What it means to operate in digital time

Operational efficiency is a huge concern for many of the businesses I’ve spoken to recently. They know they need to create, monetize and then tear down services at web-scale speed, taking action on customer journeys in real time. And they know that requires accurate, error-free resource management, provisioning, fulfilment and assurance — including the ability to open up their ecosystems and provide easily deployable and configurable network “slices” to external partners. They just aren’t sure how to get there. That’s why, in most cases, our customers are asking us to help them with an end-to-end transformation of their digital operations. 

While that kind of transformation can take many forms, in general, there are three core aspects of operations in digital time: being secure, automated and data-driven.

Achieving that involves virtualized, software-programmable next-generation networks, along with reliable and resilient public and private cloud infrastructure. You also need automated, closed-loop workflows driven by machine learning (to free people from the manual tasks that take time away from being able to innovate) as well as open-loop workflows where artificial intelligence augments human intelligence to improve decision-making.

CSPs that embrace these technologies and begin to operate in digital time will be able to:

• Create new services in an agile manner to compete with OTTs and web-scale companies
• Deliver the quality that is needed to match the expectations of their digital-native customers
• Operate and evolve their infrastructures in a more efficient and responsive way

Making Telefónica’s operations more intelligent

At Nokia, we’ve helped more than 500 companies improve their operational efficiency in recent years, including major CSPs like Verizon, Orange, AT&T, BT, MTN Nigeria and Telefónica UK.

One of the areas we’re getting asked about more and more often is the role of artificial intelligence in digital operations. Fortunately, this is also an area where we are doing quite a lot of research and development — and our customers are already seeing results.

For example, we recently helped Telefónica UK establish a new service operations center (SOC) that allows the company to move away from the simple alarm monitoring of a network operations center (NOC) and toward an approach that captures and analyzes metrics across the entire customer journey. With the intelligence embedded into the SOC, Telefónica UK can now determine what actions needed to be taken in the network based on what’s actually affecting real customers. That means they can prioritize repairs and upgrades on network devices far more efficiently than before — and in a much more customer-centric way so they can differentiate themselves in the UK market.

What digital leaders have in common

What I have found to be true across these sorts of transformation projects is that, first and foremost, digital high performers run integrated operational improvement programs that cross the entire network, from end to end. They also design for specific customer journeys — it might be how to provision a new service, for example — and they look at how technology can help make those journeys faster, easier and more efficient.

With our deep network domain expertise combined with automated intelligence, Nokia is helping CSPs around the world generate the actionable, AI-driven insights they need to create, deliver and operate their services and networks in digital time — and grab onto the opportunities of a hyperconnected world.

To learn more about how CSPs can evolve their operations for the future, check out this paper from Appledore Research.