Telecom has been a lively industry over the past three years. We’ve heard many new terms, and discussed many things. SDN, NFV, cloud data center, 4.5G, 5G, and ultra-broadband have all emerged as buzzwords. However, it’s a shame that operations have not enjoyed the same fashionable status as networks. Why is this?
The status of operations is determined by mindset. We’ve become used to a network-centric approach that places networks before operations and relegates operations to a support function.
Today’s environment, however, is very different, especially with the disruptive operating models of ISPs. It is advisable to draw on the experience of the Internet and revisit the operations model of the telecom industry. I want to offer my thoughts on three topics: one, a new perspective on operations; two, a different way of thinking about transforming operations and restructuring IT; and, three, the relationship between infrastructure evolution and transforming operations. In a nutshell, I believe a shift in mindset is needed for the telecom industry to create a new operations model based on user experience.
My first observation involves a new perspective on operations. We need to start from the end user, and then decide which model can deliver the right user experience.
The term “user experience” has two elements: obtaining services and using services. Making calls, texting, and browsing the web are part of the service usage experience for users. In reality user experience is so much more, because it includes the experience received when obtaining services. How do we find and buy services? How are transactions done? What are the after-sales services like? The answers to these questions are sometimes more important than the service itself. Clumsy transactions and lengthy provisioning may scare users away from services. To me this might be our single biggest gap compared to OTT players.
What, then, will the future experience of obtaining services be like? We summarize it as ROADS, which is the initialism of Real-time, On-demand, All online, DIY, and Social. ROADS fully captures the consumption behavior of the generation that’s grown up with the Internet over the past twenty years. They are the digital natives that shape the future. In fact, they are the future.
If we look at the telecom operations model from the perspective of consumer behavior and desired user experience, we find that a major transition is required for the IT system, specifically the OSS and BSS, where it shifts from an internal support system to a production system. This new system turns telecom operators’ networks, services, content, and other assets into compelling product and service offerings that users can easily access and use. More importantly, it’s much more than simply changing the IT system. In essence, it’s an operations transformation process that starts with user experience and harmonizes organizations, processes, IT, and infrastructure.
My second observation concerns a different way of thinking about operations transformation and IT restructuring. The design principles, operating models, and technology architecture applied by Internet companies are required to shape how the telecom industry transforms.
First, operational focus must evolve from how users experience networks to how they experience services. User experience today is primarily defined and measured through network KPIs like bandwidth, latency, call drop rate, and call completion rate. This is right, but it’s not enough. Operators need to go further to organize operations around service experience KPIs.
But it’s not just about services – it’s also how services are found, purchased, and used, as well as how after-sales services are offered. It has to be an end-to-end experience. After all, users don’t perceive network metrics. What’s relevant to them are the metrics that measure the services they actually use like voice, video, leased line, VPN, or cloud services, and metrics that measure the experience of how these services are used, for example, service provisioning in minutes.
Second, the operations model will need to be built on real-time, autonomous systems rather than manual systems. Large Internet companies tend to be much more efficient than telecom companies because they employ much smaller operations teams to serve many data centers, servers, and users. The key to efficiency is the underlying design principle. The telecom mindset is maintenance oriented – telecom operators only feel assured by human intervention and control. Being real-time and autonomous is the Internet approach where services are easily scalable and provisioned in minutes, and where faults get isolated and self-heal.
Internet systems look quite simple, but they are technically complex. This means there has to be a fundamental shift in the telecom operations model where systems become autonomous. To do that, network autonomy is needed with new IT systems at the front end and new network control systems at the back end. The traditional EMS and OSS should be simplified into monitoring and alarm systems, while service provisioning, scaling, fault isolation, and recovery have to be automated.
Third, IT systems will move from closed architecture to cloud-based Internet architecture. With new positioning for telecom IT systems – from internal support to external services – technical architecture will be fundamentally different. There might only be a few thousand internal users, but the number of external users will be in the order of hundreds of millions. In light of these new requirements, traditional scale-up architecture is insufficient in areas such as openness, ease of use, and scalability. A scale-out, cloud-based Internet architecture is the only way to support a massive number of users, which is a natural development driven by changing user needs and technological advancements.
Therefore operations transformation and IT restructuring need to be shaped with a different and more advanced design philosophy. With the new approach, system, and technology architecture, the result will be very different.
The third point is about the relationship between infrastructure evolution and operations transformation, which are highly interdependent. The software-defined infrastructure of the future will set the stage for operations transformation, but also present new challenges.
Over the past ten years, network architecture has evolved toward All-IP. Over the next decade, virtualized, cloud, and ultimately software-defined architecture will take shape. This is the broad consensus in the industry after years of discussion. It’s also the foundation for transforming operations. Many problems can be perceived as operational issues from the perspectives of user behavior and experience, but the fundamental challenge lies with infrastructure. Today telecom operators cannot provide on-line services on demand and in real time. The bottleneck is infrastructure, not the operations system. This is because infrastructure is not as automated and intelligent as it needs to be. Therefore, the new developments we see today, such as SDN, NFV, and cloud IT infrastructure, require new things from telecom operations. They are also the key building blocks for automated and intelligent operations. Without automated, cloud, and scalable infrastructure, operators cannot deliver a ROADS experience.
With software-defined architecture, cloud data centers are becoming the foundation of telecom networks. It’s also changing the way networks are deployed from node by node to layer by layer. These developments create unprecedented challenges on the ecosystem and operations model.
Through software-defined development, network equipment will no longer integrate hardware and software, and cloud data centers will become the foundation of the network. As a result, network deployment will be implemented layer by layer, not node by node.
This is a big change for the industry. The first impact is on the industry chain. It’s hard to bring products from different domains and different vendors together to form a system that can be delivered and beautifully operated. The industry chain will also develop differently. It will be built upon the ecosystem, and no longer driven by standard bodies.
The second impact is on operations. As the network moves to the cloud, SDN, and NFV, the maintenance of hardware infrastructure will be separated from service deployment and provisioning. This is because everything will be software-defined and cloud-based.
Hardware/software decoupling will make it very difficult for issue demarcation and location. In particular, network complexity is growing because software problems are sometimes caused by hardware. As a result, orchestration between hardware and software is needed. These are the changes that the operations system will have to adapt to.
Therefore, evolving infrastructure and transforming operations systems must go hand in hand, and be systematically planned and implemented based on user experience.
Such broad changes and developments are easier said than done, because many issues still need to be solved. For example, how do we define KPIs for user experience? How do we design the target architecture of the future? How can we build unified IT infrastructure? How do we move forward from today? What is the strategy and pace for evolution? How can suppliers and operators better collaborate? And, most difficult of all, how do we free ourselves from our decades-old mindset and establish the right corporate culture and organization to support future models?
To answer these questions, a mindset shift is necessary, and user experience must be at the core of shaping the way we think and act.
