How to execute digital transformation

Ilkka Aura, executive vice president, Europe and Americas,
Tecnotree

True digital transformation goes beyond converting analogue to digital or products to services, says Ilkka Aura of Tecnotree. Digital transformation requires more than incremental improvements in customer experience or even innovative business models.

It is executed through more disruptive ways of combining new technologies with innovative business models, thus creating an exponentially greater value proposition than the existing goods and services provide together.

The execution of digital transformation has to thoroughly address Communication Services Provider’s (CSP) strategy, processes, culture and technology.

Yet because of the traditionally network-centric strategy, quality maximising processes, risk minimising corporate culture and technology silos, the CSPs are severely inhibited to crack the digital disruptor challenge.

A drastically new approach is called for, to enable the CSPs to succeed in the competition against the native Digital Services Providers and Over-The-Top players:

The CSP’s strategy will need to transform technology centricity to customer centricity. CSPs also need to expand their domain from telecommunication services only to adjacent industries with embedded telco services. And the walled garden approach has to be replaced by collaborative multi industry ecosystems with focus on value creation, rather that sole ownership of the subscriber.

The approach for processes has to change from a process orientation with focus on the governance and risk mitigation, to an outcome orientation with focus on early customer engagement and learning processes. Launching new digital services takes the CSPs into uncharted business territories and hence the rigid and linear waterfall process will need to be replaced by an agile and experimental process with real customers.

The emphasis should shift from carrier grade “five nines” availability to web-speed, reducing the time to market from weeks to hours.

The technology strategy has to transform from stove-piped monoliths to adaptive architecture and open standards with outside-in integration strategy. The deployment model should maximise Software-as-a-Services (SaaS) based programmable systems in a virtualised hardware environment.

Furthermore, the deployments have to shift from complete overhauls to light-weight overlays that address the customer interfacing layers of the architecture. Finally, the migration approach should shift from big-bang data migrations to gradual commercial migration.

And finally the corporate culture has to change from focusing on controlling quality to empowering employees and innovating even at the risk of occasional failures. The appreciation of telco specific subject matter expertise has to be replaced by fostering the know-how in collaborative multi domain teams, even crowd sourcing.

Because new business models cannot be finalised in the lab or Excel spread sheet, the experimentation in encouraging corporate culture, including commercial beta-testing, has to match the time to market of competing OTT and Internet players.

The time to act is now – before the competition acts first. Join the movement, feel the thrill and take control of your destiny.

Infographics-Ovum-2016The author of this blog is Ilkka Aura, executive vice president, Europe and Americas, Tecnotree.

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