By Derry Li, President of Business and Network Consulting, Huawei

Since the development of the telecom industry, both business development, operation mode innovation, and network architecture evolution have driven digital transformation into the strategic direction of operators. Many leading operators have carried out useful exploration and practice in the digital transformation field, however, there are common difficulties and constraints:

If you are a CEO, how do you establish a unified transformation vision and a consistent understanding of top-level design at all levels of the organization? During the design of transformation objectives, journey, and path, can you get a feasibility argument for a class of issues like “What is the to-be of digital transformation?” “Can we achieve the expected effect?” “Can you succeed in doing so?”

If you are a Chief Digital Transformation Officer, you may have some problems: In the telecom industry, traditional planning, investment, construction, O&M, and user connection modes have great inertia. In the implementation and operation of transformation programs, participants cannot adopt new thinking and new modes to adapt to the uncertainties and continuous changes of digital transformation. Furthermore, before taking a radical global transformation, there is no cross-functional team to conduct some transformation tests with some new models and methods. In addition, there is a lack of complete vision to guide the restructuring of organizations and capabilities required for transformation.

If you are a CTIO, you need to think about how to make sure that you can master the existing resources (user, network, IT, data, channel, and ecosystem) and execute different operation activities of different departments. Under the Production & Operation environment and KPI system of each different department, how to overcome many realistic pressures and limitations, avoid cognitive deviation or slow action in some phases that will block the whole transformation process, reduce the time cost of transformation, and reduce the cost of correction.

If you are a CMO, how can your team quickly explore and develop digital product and service experience that users love and willing to spend more budget and time in addition to SIM Card, bandwidth, and traffic? What are the major changes and how to reconstruct the market operation and user value management system? How to reduce the cost of trial and error and shorten the exploration period? How to build a new value generation and value acquisition model under the new ecosystem?

In view of these difficulties and constraints, operators, vendors, and ecosystem partners need an environment for transformation exploration and search solution to solve problems, a full-function team that focuses on transformation focuses, a new set of agile operation mode and a “Roman square” for each industry to jointly cultivate the transformation atmosphere.

Huawei has established an Open Roads Community (OPRC) with leading operators and industry researchers who have a common vision and goal in digital transformation. The OPRC has been established to carry out innovation and development research with digital transformation as the core. At the same time, Huawei has built the Digital Transformation Practice Center  to carry out the implementation of the OPRC digital transformation theory framework system, and use the new attempts of “agile practice & innovation environment” + “full-function team operation towards transformation focus” + ” agile operation mode of user -product – offering -service – collaboration between resources and operation activities” to explore the practice of digital transformation and build capabilities with operators.

Figure: DTPC process

DTPC provides operators with a digital transformation practice and innovation environment, and establishes a full-function team consisting of Huawei, operators (cross-organization roles), and end users as well as third-party partners involved in some phases, which flexibly invoke key roles such as market analysis, customer experience design, customer journey management, product design, service design, technology and architecture design, operation and maintenance design, business model and value design, and ecosystem construction based on different scenarios. In the Huawei DTPC practice environment, the full-function team will aim at one or several transformation focuses and experience five phases including Envisioning-Ideating-Prototyping-Realizing-Scaling, helping operators to carry out digital transformation in an orderly manner.

The DTPC full-function team has the following tasks in the Envisioning phase:

The DTPC full-function team has the following tasks in the Ideating phase:

The DTPC full-function team has the following tasks in the Prototyping phase:

In the operation process, based on data/models and lightweight service orchestration, the contact points of the customer interface are integrated to implement unified customer experience management and support quick production and launch of digital products and offerings.

Integrate Operators’ resource asset elements, use model driving and orchestration technologies to invoke and orchestrate policy design and rule formulation for resources and capabilities required by products and offerings, and practice automatic service provisioning, automatic resource deployment, and self-recovery O&M at the service and resource layers, as well as practice data governance and analysis to implement data-driven operation.

Each prototype verification and iteration ensures the availability of the prototype, meets the scenario value and enjoyable user experience, and continuously reviews the feasibility of the association between the solution and financial perspectives.

The DTPC full-function team has the following tasks in the Realizing phase:

The DTPC full-function team has the following tasks in the Scaling phase:

The journey in DTPC that your team and we mutually go through is the process of transformation mode conversion, the process of capability growth, and the process of new business opportunity incubation.

The original transformation with large investment and long cycle has a considerable degree of uncertainty, which often costs tens of millions of dollars and several years of time window. Now, Huawei uses the DTPC full-function team to build a “small cycle iteration” mode with agile, short cycle, less cost, and pre-verification to achieve customer expectations and use practical and innovative attitude to assist digital transformation.