TM Forum and Huawei release ‘Digital Twin for Decision Intelligence’ white paper 2.0 at DTW 2024

At Digital Transformation World 2024 in Copenhagen, host TM forum collaborated with Huawei to publish a white paper titled Digital Twin for Decision Intelligence (DT4DI). The release of this white paper was witnessed by a total of 13 leading global operators. In addition to Huawei, the esteemed contributors to the white paper encompass seven telecommunication operators and ten vendors, including Vodafone, China Mobile (along with its subsidiaries in IT, Guangxi, Zhejiang, Shaanxi, Hong Kong, and more), HKT, AIS, STC, Nokia, Netcracker, and other industry leaders.

The underlying concept behind the white paper (WP) is the need for communication service providers (CSPs) to move from traditional Business Intelligence (BI) to a Decision Intelligence (DI) strategy and approach. To augment this necessity, the WP opens with the following quote from Cassie Kozyrkov, Chief Decision Scientist at Google: “Data are beautiful, but it's decisions that are important.”

In other words, the main reason to collect and analyse data is for it to then inform business decisions. A number of emerging technological trends are offering powerful new tools to help with that decision-making process and it’s those that this WP seeks to shine a light on. It’s the first output of a DT4DI collaboration project run by the TM Forum.

As its name indicates, the Digital Transformation World (DTW) event, which is run by the TM Forum, is primarily focused on helping CSPs with their digital transformation. Broadly, this describes the process through which the latest digital technologies are fully incorporated into a CSP business, informing every aspect of its operations and strategy.

“Translating insights and analysis results in effective decision-making, executable action plans, and managed outcomes are processes that have much room for improvement,” opens the WP. The project seeks to focus on how the emerging technology of Digital Twin (DT), as well as the current tech mega-trend of AI, can be used to significantly improve DI.

The launch event was led by Luca Franco Varvello, DT4DI Chair, Huawei (pictured above), who framed the collaborative project. “We started this project one and a half years ago, focused on how we transform data into decisions that bring to actions and generate value,” he said. From one side, decision intelligence is replacing business intelligence as the next generation of business intelligence, and from the other side is the fundamental discipline of managing AI.”

Varvello Explained that the project is ultimately about using data properly and that only then can the old saying that ‘data is the new oil’ be justified. This DT4DI white paper 2.0 describes the DT4DI project's achievements, fundamental assets, deployed top use cases (sales & marketing campaigns, NPS (Net Promoter Score) management, product recommendations, NBA, Energy Management, etc.), and future development. Take NPS management use cases, for example, as they are the most popular use cases recently, the specific focus was managing the data around customer experience to enable quicker and better decisions in response to it. But acquiring, processing and reacting to NPS data from customer experience in real time is difficult.

Utilizing the DT4DI methodology to tackle the challenge, the initial step involves developing a digital twin of the NPS across the entire real customer journey, encompassing the stages of "Engaging", "Using", and "Evaluating", as defined by TM Forum assets. This approach enables the decomposition of NPS management into three distinct components for the first time in the telco industry: Product NPS, Network NPS, and Service NPS. Subsequently, harnessing advanced technologies like AI and LLM, and integrating them with NPS management processes, a robust bridge between data and NPS is established, enabling data-driven NPS awareness and prompt reaction to data changes that could potentially impact NPS.

The above process is what the concept of DI is essentially about. Varvello concluded by conceding that DI is still fairly early in the hype cycle and that the DT4DI methodology is all about addressing matters that have high business process and decision-making complexity but also high value outcomes.

On operator partner that has been proactive in using this methodology is Globe Telecom from the Philippines and we next heard from Dennis Abella, who is VP of OSS there. “Globe actually is a leading digital platform in the Philippines,” he said. “We are not just a company that provides connectivity. We have major interests in financial technology and digital marketing, and we're also coming to venture capital funding. And likewise in terms of entertainment and health care.

“So what's our strategy as far as digital transformation is concerned? We believe that every user matters and every cell counts. That's our strategy, or North Star, is to remain as the number one leader in the industry and likewise to improve our operational excellence by providing best customer experience.”

“In terms of all the automation in this North Star strategy, we still believe there's still something that we really need to add on, which is what we call the CEI (Customer Experience Index). The key to this strategy is how we manage NPS. You can see from the graph, that’s how as we increase our CEI score.”

“Coming from the traditional way of how we manage our data, you can imagine that we had a lot of manual processing our data from the OSS. But when we introduced AI, we automated data extraction so it's almost real time on how we see the correlation between the network and also the customer.”

Prior to the conclusion of the event, the audience cast their votes twice. These individuals hailed from the upper echelons of 15 leading telecommunications operators, 3 preeminent analyst agencies worldwide and TM Forum management. The vote tallies revealed that the top three high-value scenarios for DT4DI were "Network NPS", "Precise Investment", and "Sales and Marketing". Moreover, the top three challenges in NPS management were identified as "Feedback distortion (subjective feedback)", "Survey method (small sample size and long period)", and "Network experience restoration (difficulty in pinpointing the precise location and time of poor experience events)". This indicates that the use of data and AI-driven NPS management has become a consensus among the participants, and the diverse representation of the participants significantly mirrors the broader telecommunications landscape.

All in all, this DT4DI project seems like a really substantial attempt to harness emerging digital technologies and AI to significantly improve the process of operator decision-making. Furthermore, as you would expect from the TM Forum, it’s truly collaborative. You can find out more about the whole project here.