Communications service providers (CSPs) are under unprecedented pressure as businesses and consumers rely more heavily on telecommunications, a trend accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic. This shift stresses bandwidth and telephone network capacity as users conduct virtual meetings, stream media, and share files worldwide, making CSP capabilities highly visible and tested.
At the same time, the pandemic amplifies opportunities for new business models and digital services. Fresh use cases are emerging that can drive innovation across the sector. To thrive in the digital era, CSPs must transform into genuinely digital organizations or risk falling behind.
Setting the bar high
Before the pandemic, digital-native companies such as Google, Spotify, Facebook, and Amazon had already raised customer expectations with seamless, personalized experiences. Many CSPs struggle to match those standards and suffer from poor brand perception. The Capgemini Research Institute report, Unlocking Customer Satisfaction: Why Digital Holds the Key for Telcos, found that half of the mobile operators studied had negative Net Promoter Scores, indicating customer dissatisfaction across several markets.
As CSPs are compelled to modernize core platform elements to meet growing consumer demands, several transformation models have proven effective. Choosing the right path depends on the CSP’s current technology state and the cultural changes it seeks to drive.
The right architecture for the challenge
Delivering the experiences customers expect requires a viable architecture, dependable technologies, and repeatable delivery lifecycles. These three elements are interdependent: architecture shapes solution patterns and defines performance, reliability, and modularity goals; technologies implement discrete functions and support the broader architecture; and the delivery lifecycle enables continuous inspection and rapid adaptation to maintain competitive pace.
When planning a transformation, CSPs can select from several strategic approaches based on their priorities and constraints.
A greenfield approach replaces legacy IT stacks entirely with a new platform and potentially a new brand. This approach fits organizations whose current systems cannot meet timeliness or efficiency needs and helps support new digital-only services. CSPs pursuing greenfield can build bespoke solutions, adopt commercial off-the-shelf software, or assemble best-of-breed components from multiple vendors. To reduce implementation risk, integration and customization should be minimized where possible.
A Focused Experience Dimension (FED) approach targets a specific experience or process domain within existing legacy systems. FED introduces flexibility into rigid systems to meet immediate customer needs while progressing gradually toward an end-to-end digital target architecture. Typical FED transformations revamp customer interaction and engagement layers while retaining proven backend systems for stability and lower business risk. Effective FED initiatives rely on customer data and feedback, emphasize short delivery cycles and experimentation, and follow standards and alignment. A staged transition plan and multiple interim architectures help ensure new capabilities can be acquired and integrated smoothly across lines of business.
Legacy Isolation through Digital Architecture (LIDA) uses digital integration patterns to create an abstraction layer between modern digital systems and traditional systems of record. The goal is to isolate core business capabilities in systems of record from other transactional processes and data flows. In practice, LIDA often begins by exposing APIs to enable high-volume transactions for customer data and account management, supporting self-service and modern front-end experiences.
Successful legacy isolation requires strong standards to manage real-time resiliency and eventual consistency in data management. It also depends on well-defined architectural patterns that separate transactional and operational data and control flows between real-time processing and eventual-consistency mechanisms.
Futureproofing telecommunications
Importantly, these three approaches are not mutually exclusive and can be blended to meet both urgent and long-term objectives. CSPs can use LIDA to address immediate stability and integration needs, deploy FED initiatives for rapid improvements to customer-facing experiences, and concurrently plan a greenfield rollout for a full digital brand. A one-size-fits-all transformation is no longer realistic; instead, CSPs can combine modern tools and patterns to withstand present challenges and position themselves to lead in the digital future.
Photo by Tim Mossholder on Unsplash
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