Are You Destined to Be a Victim of Digital Darwinism? Multi-Speed IT Architecture: A Transformational Path to Succeed in a Digital World

CSPs Need a New Approach to Customer Engagement

We are living in an era of “Digital Darwinism,” in which society and technology are threatening to evolve faster than communications service providers’ (CSPs’) ability to adapt. The acceleration of evolutionary change, which has had profound implications for consumers, businesses and governments, is evident in the speed of technology adoption: today, it is seemingly surpassing the pace promised by Moore’s Law, which holds that the processing power of computer technology doubles every 18 months. The radio took 38 years to get to 50 million users, while the Internet took three years, Facebook one year, and Twitter just nine months.

Now that connectivity is a given, the second wave of digital is breaking all around us. Rapid leaps in computing power, coupled with new digital capabilities for storing and managing torrents of data, are blurring the lines between industries, enabling multiple sectors to participate in a value-sharing economy that is based on peer-to-peer transactions.

Connected device penetration is maturing rapidly across all age groups, and we’re seeing a new breed of digital consumers, the “Screenagers.” This is not an age group, but a society of people with the same interests, behaviors and “liquid expectations” for a satisfactory customer experience—one in which providers from a variety of industries continue to constantly learn about their needs and adapt to them in real time.

The 2015 Accenture Digital Consumer Survey demonstrates that the Screenagers have an insatiable digital appetite. Our survey of 24,000 consumers in 24 countries reveals that:

• 87% of TV viewers use a second device such as a smartphone, tablet, or PC/laptop simultaneously.

• 89% of consumers watch long-form video over the Internet.

• 83% of consumers read news online daily and weekly.

At the same time, Screenagers are disenchanted with the quality of their user experience. Of the consumers who purchase intelligent devices, 83% have difficulties using them. This gap between what’s being delivered and consumers’ ever-evolving expectations is creating an “expectation chasm.” In addition, 54% of digital consumers are cautious about the information they share, due to their lack of confidence in the online security that protects their personal data.

Screenagers would prefer to trust established brands, including CSPs—and CSPs are also the natural facilitators of the digital lifestyle. However, to be successful going forward, CSPs need to be able to adapt in real time to the Screenagers’ behaviors, interests, and attitudes. Keeping Screenagers engaged and loyal is a journey that, like a marriage, has multiple “moments of truth,” each of which requires specific care.

Delivering the Preferred Customer Journey

For CSPs, the challenge goes beyond attracting consumers with an apt promotion or offering; winning them by obtaining an order; and, converting them to a lifelong bond by delivering a consistent customer experience. To retain Screenagers’ favor in the face of rapid change, much more than this is needed, including keeping them engaged through “experience-led design”—the capability to capture customers’ persona, the archetype of the user around whom the customer experience should be designed, and to deliver their preferred Customer Journey in real time.

Key to doing this is the use of customer insight enabled by big data, and agility in deploying content and tailoring the customer experience across multiple channels. This differs radically from CSPs’ past approach to the customer, which was largely based on vertical functions—e.g., designing a trouble ticket system based on the business requirements of the function, regardless of whether or not it had been touched during the customer journey.

The customer journey—described from an end-to-end perspective as an interaction with the customer that spans multiple touch points and underlying systems—has radically evolved. Typical today is the “click to collect” customer journey, where the customer navigates the web to get information about a product, then buys it online and collects it at the store where s/he can buy also other things consistently. S/he can also share feedback with friends on social media, and in case of complaints, use a mobile app to open a service request or use a digital assistant. Shown in Figure 1 is an example of an ideal digital customer interaction across these and other touch points.

DigitalMarketing

Integrate,Evolve,

Innovate

CRM

Analytics/Big Data &

Social Listening

Build Advocacy

Feedback

Attract

Qualify Consumer& Propose Relevant

Experiences

Increase Conversation

& Engagement rate

Purchase

Trend Spotting

TV advertisingSocial MediaSearch Engine

Personalized Content TargetingeCoupon SurveyEmail Campaign

Newsletter

Phone SurveyFeedback SurveyReview PortalReviews on eRetailer

Click-2-BuyIn StoreeRetailerBrand.com Website

Social Listening

Customer Sentiment

Source: Accenture Analysis

QR Code and BTL PortalNew Products Launch

Share ContentShare ReviewShare Recipe

Share Purchase

Sample ProductsLive Chat

Competition

Figure 1: The “Perfect” Digital Customer Interaction

As the complexity of this diagram suggests, such a customer journey is increasingly dependent on a rapidly expanding “value fabric”—a mesh of interwoven, cooperating organizations and individuals, all of which potentially have a monetized role to play in delivering on a Screenager’s digital expectations. In such a complex value fabric, the interaction is not only with the customer, but also with internal users and with external users (i.e., third parties) of whom many will have similar requirements for customer information and ultimate monetization.

Experience Led Design (UX + CX = EX)

Systems of Engagement

Systems of Record

Designedto Engage Omni-Channel

by Design

Service & SalesConvergence Single Brain

Digital Assistant

RTD (NBAEnablement) LoyaltyCampaign & Funnel

Management

........... Customer JourneysAutomation

Customer Insightand Analytics

ContentManagement

Search EngineSEO

APIs ServiceBroker

Social SentimentAnalysis

Digital SalesBoost

Social & CrowdEngagement

Cross ChannelCampaign

Couponing & Loyalty

Digital ContentManagementNetwork

Optimization

Marketing ROI

“Personas”at the Center

Poweredby Insight Agile

All of these parties are part of the customer experience, and CSPs need to approach them in an integrated way from an IT perspective. As Figure 2 shows, this is best addressed through the concept of “experience led design,” (EX) as shown through the equation UX + CX = EX, in which both user experience (UX) and customer experience (CX) need to be approached in a single unified view.

Figure 2: Experience-Led Design: Embracing Both Systems of Engagement and Systems of Record

An integrated approach requires pulling together multiple “systems of engagement” into a single, seamless value fabric of engagement that addresses Screenager experience expectations in real time, leveraging the data they leave everywhere, and exploiting APIs as needed to share data with partners and/or third parties. This new approach will allow systems of engagement to operate at “digital speed,” by enabling the quick deployment of new customer-engaging software/content and by supporting agile operations for multiple customer-engaging systems, such as landing page optimization, SEO, SEM, content management, social and crowd engagement, channel listening, single brain for NBA and cross-channel marketing campaigns, and couponing and loyalty. Everything is powered by insight.

APIs will allow CSPs to share data with internal functions, partners and/or third parties in a secure way, in order to monetize data or fill informational gaps. An “APIs’ service broker” will be essential in order to permit data to be processed appropriately and safely—either to be consumed, in which case the telco will pay third parties, or to be exposed, in which case the CSP will monetize it.

Required for Effectiveness: A Multi-Speed IT Architecture

To be effective, therefore, these systems of engagement will require a special level of speed that is likely to accelerate—moving beyond the speed requirements of CSPs’ traditional systems of record, such as BSS and OSS, while still requiring some level of interaction with these systems of record. In order to generate actionable insights and monetize them in a timely manner, CSPs need to reduce “time to insight” and increase “speed to decision” by integrating big data and enterprise data into a single data supply chain—one that provides an active role for both systems of engagement and systems of record, utilizing them in a smart way and with a human touch.

Explorations through big data and enterprise data will be performed in an agile mode in order to identify valuable correlation among data (data discovery) and proceed with the industrialization of the use cases, which pass the proof of value. The customer experience itself needs to address the liquid expectations generated by the blurring of the boundaries of sectors, and to change at speed, depending on factors such as market pressure, competition and the expectations created by adjacent industries.

For this reason, systems of engagement require changes at clock speed (or real time), and very often adopt agile approaches to development and operations, such as DevOps. By contrast, systems of record need to place their greatest emphasis on reliability, and typically change at a slower pace, with development often taking place through tools such as Canvas and Waterfall.

Each of these very different approaches will require very different types of speed and coordination. To maintain the stability of CSPs’ Systems of Record, while accelerating the speed with which their systems of engagement can adapt on the customer level, individual CSPs need to put in place a “multi-speed IT architecture.”

A multi-speed IT architecture recognizes the value and identity of each layer of a telco architecture, managing the tradeoff between the agility required by the systems of engagement, and the reliability and control required by the systems of record.

It is worth to notice how the boundaries between systems of engagement and systems of record are blurring thanks to extensive Cloud adoption and migration towards XaaS. In fact, large applications such as CRM, being a key component of the BSS, are becoming leaner by being decomposed into several components (customer and account management, product catalog, CPQ, asset management, sales force management). Each component can share its business logic and capabilities across the multiple channels and touch points while maintaining a clear data mastership and minimize data replication.

The boundaries between systems of record and the infrastructure and network are blurring as well with application such as billing, is becoming leaner and decomposed into several components such as billing, charging, and policy control in order to implement and monetize compelling use cases like the micro-transactions where the devices and the connected objects are interacting directly with the network elements.

D A R W I N I S M

The network and infrastructure are also increased in agility thanks to the migration to cloud and the virtualization of the network to NFV (network functions virtualization) and SDN (software defined networks).

A multi-speed IT architecture can also facilitate all of the major requirements for Screenager engagement we have outlined, including:

• Putting experience-led design at the heart of agile digital operations.

• Keeping customers engaged in a journey with several moments of truth.

• Exploiting the data-driven enterprise to provide a superior experience and monetize data.

• Allowing Systems of Records to focus on reliability and control.

• Implementing the openness required to fully exploit APIs in order to support collaboration in creating a value fabric.

As shown in Figure 3, the required level of decoupling between the systems of engagement and the systems of record is enabled by a back end as a service/decoupling layer.

A back end as a service/decoupling layer will encapsulate core capabilities in the back end, caching most accessed data for high-performance digital channels.

The decoupling layer will be critical in preserving the integrity, security and stability of CSPs’ systems of record, particularly given the multi-party fabric of customer engagement. The decoupling layer both hides the systems of record, and makes their capability available to the systems of engagement as a service to be consumed or exposed.

The decoupling layer is also an enabler for technology, way of work, and the organizational aspects required to exploit the systems of engagement. Thanks to this decoupling, the CSPs will be able to manage the trade-off between

the agility required to build, deploy and run applications and experiences for customers, partners and employees, and the reliability and control required for the systems of record. The systems of record operations will go at their own speed in order to continue running reliably, efficiently, and securely.

It is critically important for CSPs to be able to recognize the value and identity of each layer of a CSP’s IT architecture, and to manage the trade-off between the agility required by the systems of engagement and the reliability and control required for the systems of record. A multi-speed IT architecture will help to do just that.

Experience Manager

Digital Customer Interaction API Exposure

Big Data &Analytics

Back-end as a Service/Decoupling Layer

TraditionalNetwork Cloud SDN / NFV

Digital Service Enabler and Data Monetisation

OTT with the 3rd party

SystemsEngagement

Infrastructure& Network

Systems of Record(Tradional OSS/BSS)

Core [Cross-Channels] Capabilities

Figure 3: The Multi-Speed IT Architecture: A Modern Perspective about the Value of Speed

Digital

Customer always being at the center from different angles, but evolving

2016-2020

Experience Manager

Billing Centric

1995-2005 2005-2015

Monolithic

Billing &Asset Based

CRM Centric

CRM

Billing

Order Management

Experience Manager

Digital Customer Interaction API Exposure

Big Data &Analytics

Back-end as a Service/Decoupling Layer

TraditionalNetwork Cloud SDN / NFV

Digital Service Enabler and Data Monetisation

OTT with the 3rd party

Core [Cross-Channels] Capabilities

Multi-Speed IT Architecture: Playing a Critical Role in CSPs’ Evolution

The establishment of a multi-speed IT architecture will also play a critical role in enabling CSPs to evolve their customer relationships to the degree that will be demanded by Screenagers. As Figure 4 shows, for the past two decades, the Communications industry, in order to become more customer centric, has continually evolved in its relationship to the customer:

• In the 1995-2005 timeframe, the CSPs’ architecture was monolithic, billing centric and based on assets as product and service installation of the customers.

• From 2005 to 2015, the CSPs architecture was CRM-centric—expanded, but still relying on systems of record that embraced a common view of the customer across CRM, billing and service fulfillment and optimized order management.

• From 2016 to 2020, we can anticipate a higher level of customer engagement, integrating a wide range of customer touch points and third-party providers in order to deliver personalized customer experiences that are contextualized in real time, and contiguous across channels.

CSPs are now at an inflection point: they must either decide to become a Digital Operator, acting as an aggregator of services within the value fabric, or else they risk becoming a mere pipe.

Systems of engagement enable CSPs to interact with all their customers and users, to take full advantage of this new paradigm and become full-fledged Digital Operators.

Systems of record, even leaner, provide core BSS and OSS capabilities at the proper level of granularity to be shared and actioned across the systems of engagement.

Figure 4: The Evolutionary Journey of CSPs’ IT Architecture

Both are powered by big data and analytics platforms, reducing the “time to insight” and increasing “speed to decision”, thanks to the data made available from the entire application portfolio and by third parties.

This new paradigm recognizes the value and the identity of both the back-end operational systems and the fast-changing world of customer engagement.

New classes of products will need to be launched at speed both above and below the line, independent of traditional infrastructure, while new flavors of existing product classes will need to utilize agile methodologies. To succeed in the digital world, experience-led design will need to become embedded in the organization’s DNA, and a multi-speed IT architecture will be a foundational component.

Managing at multi-speed will require more than just a new IT architecture. CSPs will also need to design and implement a new organization—one that fosters the ongoing co-existence of new and traditional IT systems, and the new governance required to use them optimally. CSPs will also need to attract and retain new talents required to succeed in the digitized world, including entire new skill categories, such as data scientist, digital media agency and service design, which are key to extracting maximum value.

In order to achieve a new, agile way of working that takes maximum advantage of the new IT infrastructure, CSPs will require partners that will help them achieve the full potential of people, processes and technology. By fully leveraging the back end as a service and being insulated from old encumbrances, CSPs will be enabled to keep pace with the Screenagers, respond quickly to digital challenges, and maintain sufficient independence from legacy systems and approaches to design and sustain the new customer experience.

Authors

Tom Loozen Global Lead of Communications industry practice within Accenture’s Communications, Media and Technology operating group

tom.loozen@accenture.com

Adriano Poloni Managing Director, Communications Center of Excellence Lead, Global Communications industry CTO

adriano.poloni@accenture.com

Andrea Cesarini Managing Director, Communications Center of Excellence, EALA Communications industry CTO

andrea.cesarini@accenture.com

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About Accenture

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