BANKOK, THAILAND - How does an operator become agile, faster and more flexible in order to not only survive but thrive in an open and vibrant digital world? Today’s lively discussion on Back to the Future: what the Digital Back-Office Must Deliver had some of the answers.
To start with, telcos should set about reimagining themselves as service providers answerable to the end user, redesigning their process systems and organizational thinking accordingly. And then there is the matter of making good on the promise of machine-to-machine (M2M) communications and cross-sector convergence. As Pat McCarthy from Ericsson pointed out, talking about transport as one of the biggest of these new value opportunities for the ICT industry to date, “This is a new ecosystem. It isn’t just the telecoms language, it is transport language and security language. So we have to learn it in order to talk to new players and describe the benefits.”
For Vyas Varma from Wipro Technologies, the multiple partner models inherent in the implementation of ICT will not happen overnight, but will take a new way of doing business, perhaps as a form of systems integrator. “It is a good situation for the telcos right now,” he said, “as they are sitting on the infrastructure right there where they make a difference,” controlling the quality of experience in a way no OTT could. But not without a different kind of collaborative behaviour.
Exploiting the network to offer differentiated services and increased value involves working on the back end to increase efficiency and capitalize the core, said Chari TVT from Ceclom Axiata Berhad. One of the difficulties is that even within companies, the language and motivation of the CFO is not the same as that of a new technology innovator.
Session moderator Tony Poulos from TM Forum queried whether the back office would become a bit player as a partner in a system providing dynamic allocation, or whether it may be squeezed onto the margins. Controlling that quality will become a key aspect of service provision as more and more customers consume more and more bandwidth whilst still expecting service standards to be delivered. For Varna, “we need to look at creating products and services at the granular level, so that you can bundle them and do a quicker roll out integration.”
This is what big data can do. Big data analytics is the glue holding together the back office business and the network operators who all need and can use this information. “We need to hold on to the scientists,” concluded Chari, the people who can “pick the needle” from the hay stack of big data every time and allow the market to address individuals as a competitive differentiator.