Communications service providers (CSPs) are facing unprecedented pressure as both businesses and the public move to telecommunications during the COVID-19 pandemic. The shift serves to highlight a CSP’s capabilities, testing bandwidth limits and telephone network capacities as users hold virtual meetings, stream content and share files across the globe.
The potential for new business models and digital services is heightened by this new world order; now, more than ever, we are seeing compelling new use cases to drive innovation forwards in this sector. In order to succeed in the digital future, CSPs must figure out how to be truly digital or risk relegation.
Setting the bar high
But where were we before the pandemic hit? Digital natives like Google, Spotify, Facebook and Amazon have clearly defined a new standard for customer experience. Realistically, CSPs struggle to keep up and consequently suffer from poor brand perception. The Capgemini Research Institute’s Unlocking Customer Satisfaction: Why Digital Holds the Key for Telcos report found half of mobile operators had a negative Net Promoter Score, reflecting dissatisfaction in six of nine countries studied.
As CSPs are urged to transform core elements of their platforms to meet the ever-increasing demands of consumers in our rapidly digitally-reliant world, there are a number of models for success they can adopt.
The right architecture for the challenge
To deliver the experiences consumers expect, CSPs need a viable architecture, reliable technologies and repeatable delivery lifecycles. These three key elements rely and feed on each other, with the goal of making solutions easily interchangeable to enable a rapid move from ideation to realization.
Architecture gives shape to the solutions by providing patterns on which functions can be distributed and laying critical cornerstones for performance, reliability and modularity. Technologies enable discrete functions and the broader architecture, while also providing opportunities for efficiencies in function, reliability and modularity. Finally, the delivery lifecycle creates an opportunity to inspect and rapidly adapt to keep or set the pace in the digital arms race, in tandem with a new way of working.
As CSPs look to transform their core operations they have a wide variety of options to choose from. Choosing a direction and designing the corresponding transformation journey depends on both the current state of their digital technologies and how the CSP wants to drive people and culture change.
The greenfield approach includes a full replacement of the legacy IT stack with a new set of capabilities and potentially a new accompanying brand, perfect for when a business’ existing system can’t function in a timely or efficient manner. It can also help meet growing demand for new digital-only services. CSPs have the option to build from scratch, look for commercial off-the-shelf offerings, or take a best-of-breed approach which integrates components from various vendors. However, to reduce implementation risks integration and customization should be limited where possible.
For CSPs who prefer not to go for a whole change, a Focused Experience Dimension (FED) approach includes a calculated focus on a narrower experience or process domain within the legacy stacks. This helps introduce flexibility to rigid systems and meet immediate needs, while more slowly moving towards a target end-to-end digital architecture. A typical FED transformation focuses on revamping the customer interaction and engagement layer while continuing to use legacy backend applications for stability and reduced business impact. This approach must be informed by customer data and feedback, with a focus on a shorter delivery timeline and experimentation. In setting a FED strategy, standards conformance and alignment are required, as is a step-by-step plan to acquire new capabilities through multiple transition architectures. This is so that future enhancements to the stack can be done smoothly, and the same stack can be reused for multiple lines of businesses.
Legacy Isolation through Digital Architecture (LIDA) is the practice of using digital integration architecture patterns and solutions to build an abstraction layer between modern, digital systems and classic systems of record. The goal is to isolate the core business-driving features of the systems of record from other transactional processes, functions and data. Few details from CSPs using this approach are yet public. However, in our experience, the process begins by enabling APIs to support high-volume transactions for core customer data and account management for self-service.
Legacy isolation requires adherence to strong standards to address concepts like real-time resiliency and eventual consistency in data management. It also needs strong architecture patterns for the segmentation of transactional and operational data and to manage the flow between proper patterns for real-time resiliency and eventual consistency.
Futureproofing telecommunications
Critically, all three approaches can be blended to address both short-term and long-term goals. CSPs can meet their most urgent transformation needs through LIDA and make short-term improvements to select experiences with a limited scope FED strategy, all while working toward the launch of a full greenfield digital brand. The days of a one-size-fits-all transformation are long gone and new tools are at hand to help CSP’s weather the current storm and prepare for – and conquer – the digital future.
Photo by Tim Mossholder on Unsplash
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