As Telia transforms its IT, ServiceNow plays an increasingly important role as a digital platform and service

Considering that with the increasingly fast dynamic changes affecting the communication network and service industry, traditional telecom operators are facing multiple pressures. The Nordic operator Telia is transforming and reorganizing its assets, operations and processes to reduce complexity and change. To be more streamlined and stable. Greater opportunities for growth and survival in the cloud-oriented 5G era: Like many telecommunications companies, Telia’s key areas of transformation are its digital asset foundation and IT supplier relationships.

Under the leadership of President and CEO Allison Kirkby, who took office in May 2020, Telia sold operating units and assets (Telia Carrier, Turkcell shares, towers) to focus on the Nordic and Baltic markets, and introduced them as part of its efforts Better Telia, four strategic pillars-connecting everyone, motivating our customers, sustainable delivery and digital transformation.

While all four are worthy of careful study (sustainability efforts have been very compelling in recent months), the digital approach to transformation is now worth paying attention to, because at its core is the approach that telecom companies have been talking about for years. It turns out, It is very difficult to implement, but as operators increasingly adopt a multi-cloud approach to daily business-IT transformation (with a great emphasis on rationalization), this is now more important than ever. This is closely related to Telia’s plan to drastically reduce the number of services it provides in multiple markets (it has thousands, a reduction of at least 50%), while also developing a platform that enables it to effectively utilize 5G Standalone services Exploit and deliver potential (for example, network slicing).

Telia provided the latest information on its IT transformation work when reporting its second quarter financial report, including a small increase in revenue to 21.9 billion Swedish kronor (2.53 billion US dollars) last week. It states:

“This quarter, our’digital transformation’ work also made good progress, aimed at transforming the customer experience, simplifying product portfolio, automating processes, increasing the use of data analysis, and removing legacy systems. The expansion of our partnership with ServiceNow Will further increase the use of data and analysis, and promote the acceleration of becoming a truly customer-centric automation service provider. By 2021, we have eliminated more than 75 legacy systems, thereby reducing IT costs, and we are completely reducing the strategy Progress has been made on the IT supplier side-from 24 to 4-which is expected to be our overall cost reduction goal by 2025.”

In the teleconference between operators and investors, Kirkby pointed out that the four strategic IT vendors are Accenture, Capgemini, TCS and TietoEVRY. “As of June, we have benefited from improved business terms and new ways of working,” the CEO noted, adding that this approach will reduce operating and capital costs in the next five years, totaling approximately 750 million Sweden Krona (US$87 million), and in the second quarter, operators stopped using 75 old IT systems, which resulted in additional IT savings of approximately SEK 45 million (US$5.2 million).

As Telia phases out its legacy systems across the group, it hopes to increase the use of common products used in its multiple operations and develop systems that comply with TM Forum specifications, such as open APIs and open digital architecture (ODA). One of the companies benefiting from this approach is ServiceNow, an expert in software as a service (SaaS) workflow automation. It was originally selected to simplify daily operations related to network and system operations, but now it also handles customer engagement and experience processes, using Telia The central portal for support staff replaces 25 legacy systems. (It is worth noting that ServiceNow and Telia are signatories to the ODA Declaration of the TM Forum).

Now, this relationship has expanded as Telia seeks to make better use of its data and analysis capabilities at its fingertips. “We have reached a strategic innovation partnership with the software provider ServiceNow, which will drive our operations and [be] Is a key driver of our value proposition for the coordinator of B2B customers,” Kirkby pointed out on the second quarter earnings call.

This is part of the effort identified in January of this year, when Telia provided the latest information on its strategy, and Rainer Deutschmann, Group Chief Operating Officer, talked about “By implementing what we call a universal data-driven organization, we can make decisions based on correct and real-time data. “

This in turn promotes automation. “We are moving towards a unified process for customers and internal back-office departments, which will again bring better IT support and lower costs… and then we are looking for… intelligent automation, which is based on analysis and data. So. , We can provide customers with personal recommendations, or we can provide specific process variants based on the needs at this time,” Deutschmann pointed out, adding that operators have established “automated centers of excellence.”

Telia is making rapid progress and speaking and behaving like a digital telecommunications company, which will help provide good reference accounts for its partners and suppliers.

This is certainly the case with ServiceNow, which identifies telecommunications (and financial services and healthcare) as a key focus area for business growth, and has been developing industry-specific workflows (based on existing R&D work with telecommunications companies such as BT) , And amazing partnerships with companies such as EXFO, Atrinet, and Accenture, the latter being the “strategic listing partner” for its new telecommunications solutions.

ServiceNow also named AT&T, NTT, Vodafone, and Tata Communications as some of the other network operators it cooperates with, as well as BT and Telia, so it has become deeply entrenched in the telecom sector: as process automation becomes more and more important to cost and cost operations Efficiency, ServiceNow is expected to appear more and more in the next few years, because cloud-oriented software platform participants are working hard to deliver core orchestration systems that are essentially back-end and customer-oriented operations of telecommunications companies.

-Ray Le Maistre, Editorial Director of TelecomTV