Unzipping the Digital World

Keith Willetts, Chairman & Founder of the TM Forum, believes that “everything that can be digital will be.” It is inevitable that more and more goods and services will move to a digital platform. That’s unstoppable. When talking about the key competencies needed for telco industry leadership, business model innovation, a customer-centric spirit, the ability to partner with others, visionary leadership, and software capacity are what is needed. Regarding the impact of the digital economy on operator BSS/OSS, he suggests that operators enhance their big data analysis and policy management capabilities based on their BSS/OSS data.

He concludes, " A lot of operators today will manage their network perfectly satisfactorily, but the customers know more about the status of their network than they do because the customers are monitoring the network in real time; they are using the network. The operator may know about certain breaches of thresholds or failures, but they don’t know what’s happening with regard to the customer experience. To get to the levels that people require, I think that we are going to see a big shift in tools and techniques for putting yourself in the shoes of the customer, so you are able to measure the customers’ experience in real time. So, customer-centricity, backed up by data analytics and policy management technologies, will be very important OSS/BSS growth areas.”