Operational complexity is the enemy of a smooth-running telco business. Unfortunately, says Shane Sura, Colt’s VP of network operations, complexity is a fact of life behind the scenes for most service providers thanks to the mish-mash of systems and platforms that they have deployed over the years to resolve individual challenges.
This strategy of piecemeal solutions has left them with a patchwork of systems that do not, indeed cannot, connect effectively with each other. Therefore, even while most telcos are fairly efficient these pieced together solutions makes it impossible to be nimble, quickly react to the market, and on board new products and solutions.
Attempts have been made in the past to impose order through the use of automation tools with the primary aim of reducing costs and, often as a byproduct, improving customer service. However, now these automation efforts have run their course, no longer able to adapt to a world that is rapidly transforming itself for a digital future.
Older tools are in many cases simply adding to the complexity they were intended to resolve, and lack the scalability, agility and flexibility that a modern service provider business needs. It is imperative to find a new way of uniting all these different siloes together into a manageable whole.
It is time for a different approach to automation, one that has the power to work outside the constraints of individual linear functions. The right kind of automation would be able to embrace a large amount of unstructured data from across a number of different parts of a telco business.
These individual bits of data might share a relationship when considered from, say, a customer service perspective, but current systems can’t spot that. The power of this kind of automation is that it can understand details and events and negotiate multiple pathways in the interest of resolving challenges in the most effective and speedy manner possible.
Can modern automation techniques do this?
Honestly, no, not without a complete rethink of the entire system stack. If we think back to the premise that today’s telcos have built a complicated web of interspersed systems, this means those systems are separate islands.
Being separate also means that the critical and vast amounts of data that artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) need to be successful, is not available. Therefore, without looking at the system stack as a whole, and making some difficult but strategic choices, true future proof automation will not be successful.
While the journey will be hard, the benefits of it cannot be undervalued. Where it was once possible for humans to maximise the performance of a network manually and spot where it was not delivering optimal results, it no longer is. A modern network features so many different service types, based on multiple platforms and operating across different geographies.
As services run through multiple technology stacks, AI and ML will become the only way to give human intelligence an opportunity to interrogate and understand nuances and dependencies of these modern networks. The power of AI means that we can now enjoy visibility over a telco’s entire data ecosystem and easily understand the impact that different events can have.
Another benefit of this journey is the impact to our employees. With AI and ML in place, highly qualified technical staff are free to focus on more rewarding work than trying to unite unconnected siloes of data and coordinate otherwise unrelated workflows.
Now they have the tools they need to oversee end-to-end workflows and check that they operate optimally while concentrating on solving real business problems. Better automation lets people tap their creativity and ingenuity in the pursuit of more customer focused solutions.
To enable the benefits described here, telcos would be well advised to seek out the right partnerships. Any network transformation journey will be smoother with help from someone who understands real telco challenges as well as the subtleties of AI and open architectures. The right partner can help you bring about a complete shift at the network operations layer to evolve your network system architecture and improve monitoring and performance functions.
The author is Shane Sura, VP of network operations at Colt.
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