Beyond Automation —
Fostering Coordination and Innovation

Pablo Martinez, Marketing Director, Telcordia

Fully automated service experiences are proliferating. Service providers are reaping the rewards of automated telecom operations processes, achieving levels of cost management success and service consistency never before possible. But automation alone can lead to stagnant efficiency, making customization and innovation difficult. 

Success comes from a balanced approach using both automated systems and human systems and capitalizing on their respective strengths. That way, you combine appropriate levels of automation with flexible coordination and the ability to quickly customize, improve, and innovate with low operational impact to operational processes such as order-to-cash.

Automation, for example, works well when applied to well-known, repetitive tasks. These tasks should have the necessary procedural and data consistency to fit within a structured approach and run uninterrupted. Consistency is critical. Without it, automation tends to suffer from excessive process fallout and may also promote suboptimal customer experiences.

Human Systems Set the Stage

Human systems work best when applied to unstructured, changing environments characterized by high variability or limited knowledge. Extensive customizations of complex technologies, services often changed by customers, and leading-edge services that are just at the beginning of the knowledge curve are all examples. These are the environments where customization and innovation live. Human systems excel in those environments because only human beings are currently able to deal with unexpected situations and adapt to change. Once enough task knowledge is acquired or a reasonable level of stability is reached, automation can play a role – but not before. The key is to have the structure and discipline to capture and operationalize what the operations staff is learning from doing things manually. 

Once best practices for a task are determined, there should be a framework in place that not only translates those practices to drive automation, but also fosters a consistent, yet agile, progression of knowledge to cope with the resulting higher levels of complexity and more sophisticated modes of human coordination. This is particularly critical when, for instance, offering enterprise services. Enterprise customers see telecom services as enablers of differentiation, which requires frequent, manually-intensive customization by the service provider. A service request is really a “project” involving many orders, systems, groups, and regions, and requires highly specialized, continuously evolving operational knowledge.

Of course, at any point in time, a provider will be using a number of both human and software systems. Disciplined, structured coordination among them is necessary for efficiency and profitability. This involves two basic functions. One is a catalog function, and the other is a task coordination function. 

A Dynamic Catalog Yields Consistency

The catalog function provides the consistency needed to make automation efficient. Communication service providers (CSPs) are continually moving through waves of new procedural challenges. As ways to meet those challenges are developed, new best practices emerge, leading to further opportunities for automation. At the same time, CSPs need to keep revising what they have automated to make sure best practices stay relevant over time. A flexible platform, based upon a “dynamic” catalog, is critical for achieving this.

A dynamic catalog is very different from a traditional one. A traditional catalog documents products and their elements, facilitating the creation of product variations. This works well for relatively simple products, but it is not enough when dealing with increasingly complex products that are more sensitive to the efficiencies of the processes involved. It is also not enough to sustain innovation at a business model level to transcend new varieties of existing products.

For that, a catalog function has to include “dynamic” service design and the management of automated processes. It needs to store and drive the relevant processes while dealing with a degree of real-time variability by dynamically applying business rules, policies, and network data. The catalog understands everything that the network can accomplish, in service terms. It brings together the commercial and technical, service and resource, and data and process information required to fulfil highly complex and variable services economically. Yet it still insulates underlying systems from extensive changes and costly impacts. No other BSS/OSS element can provide this type of insight, nor orchestrate across both business and operational domains.

The Ultimate Task Master

The second basic function mentioned earlier, task coordination, provides the mechanism to manage both manual human and automated software activities. It coordinates automated activities, directed by the dynamic catalog, to guide service orders through validation, decomposition, routing, provisioning/activation, and status tracking. It also executes flexible policies to fulfill partial orders, escalate stalled orders, and rollback failed and cancelled orders.

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