Embracing Outside-in Transformation

70% Of Digital Transformations Fail

Digital transformations often falter due to inadequate planning and oversight. Common pitfalls include data migration issues and miscommunications during the integration of various software systems. These challenges are particularly pronounced in telco digital transformations, where the complexity of managing multiple disparate vendors can lead to significant setbacks.

Getting it wrong leads to wasted man-hours and budget overruns, but the biggest loss is missing out on the promised benefits of the transformation—turning it into a massive waste of resources.

What if a digital transformation approach came from a team that's both a telco operator and a software provider? Our full-stack clean slate approach offers exactly that.

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Challenges Solved by the Full-Stack Clean Slate Approach

Cleanslate Planning, Tried and Tested Perspectives

If your telco is considering a traditional 'inside-out' transformation, here are some common reasons digital transformations fail:

• Missing the Big Picture: Viewing digital transformation as just an IT project rather than a complete organizational overhaul.
• No Strong Vision: Lacking a compelling vision that unites the entire organization, including people, processes, and mindsets.
• Forgetting to Align Incentives: Disparate goals between IT and business departments can derail progress.
• Not Freeing Up the Right People: Failing to allocate or recruit the necessary talent to drive the transformation.
• Lacking a Control Tower: Ineffective project management that leads to missed milestones, budget overruns, and misalignment.

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Having the right vision, alignment, and focus on people is crucial for telcos. Given the high stakes and potential losses of a failed digital transformation, partnering with an experienced team for an ‘outside-in’ transformation can be invaluable, reducing the risks associated with traditional ‘inside-out’ approaches.

Our ‘clean slate’ philosophy extends to both our planning and software approach.

When we start from a ‘clean slate,’ we prioritize your new telco brand's goals without being hindered by the issues of your legacy tech stack. This freedom allows us to create a future state that is more customer-centric, agile, and future-proof, ensuring your telco thrives in a rapidly evolving market.

At Circles, we’ve helped telco clients launch digital brands worldwide. The following has been tested and sharpened by real-world scenarios:

• Battle-tested planning perspectives
• A tried and tested vision for your techco's future state
• A plan that properly involves your organization from people, processes, and departments
• Tried and tested project management teams and techniques

In terms of technology, the clean slate approach means migrating your data to a completely new software suite. This eliminates the need to deal with any legacy tech stack issues, and the new software stack comes with all the functionality that a telco brand would need. 

This software is built to be customer-centric from the ground up, powered by our learnings from running Circles.life in Singapore and used by our partners like KDDI’s povo in Japan and e&’s onic in Pakistan. We cover more about what our software can do in the ‘full-stack section’ below.

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A Full-stack Software Approach Solves Integration Issues

Legacy telco software tends to be complex and clunky, with layers of individual software built upon the original business service (BSS) and operating system software (OSS). 

Updates and changes are made to individual software requiring lots of integrations and communication - straining your tech team and increasing operating costs. These systems tend to be rigid and difficult to modify, with changes made through requests to each vendor. All this robs your telco of agility and adaptability to market changes.

Many of these issues can be solved by working with a vendor that offers a full software stack in one place. This can prevent long integration times and cross-wires when trying to integrate all these services across multiple vendors.

From running our software, Circles’ software stack includes the following non-exhaustive list:

• BSS with a built-in customer experience and enablement, product cataloging, and partner management as well as billing and revenue management
• Data management and analytics - including data governance, reporting, churn prediction and intervention and more
• Cloud capabilities - cloud management, cloud agnostic capabilities, business and granular APIs, and more
• More capabilities are continuously being developed.

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Data Migration Assistance

Once the new platform is set up, telco customer data needs to be migrated from the old software. Service disruptions from failed migrations can cause customers to churn, losing telcos revenue. Proper risk mitigation strategies need to be implemented and executed.

Outside-in digital transformation partners can help data migration in the following ways:

Exhaustive mapping of existing systems

Deep dive sessions with domain experts and business teams to map details and customer data

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Customer Down Time Communication Plan

Minimum 2 weeks’ notice for service downtime OR inform of slower off-peak hours service

Alternative channels for customers during migration (e,g, hotline, email, etc) 

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Pilot Tests, Phased Migration and Stability Periods

Migrate data in batches. E.g. Employees as a pilot batch, then 10% of users

Have a stability period (e.g. 1 month) before the next batch

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Robust Project Management

Clearly define scope and roles and responsibilities with key stakeholders

Scenario planning - Rigorous testing and rehearsals

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Performance Monitoring

Run data audit and monitoring reports at each stage

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Backup, Roll-back and Recovery

Testing and rehearsing roll-back and recovery plans

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We take our planning and testing seriously and have a more detailed data migration plan that we can discuss if you want to learn more about our approach.

The Cleanslate, Fullstack Approach Methodology:

With our experience running Circles.life in Singapore and Australia, our teams can help to guide you through the digital transformation of your telco brand.

We have 2 low-risk options when it comes to digitally transforming your telco brand:

• Scale up of Parallel Brand
• Phased Migration of Existing Brand

Once these have been decided, we go through the following general steps with our clients:

Discovery: 

No two digital transformations are the same. Different telcos have different types of customers, telco service offerings, value-added services, and more. Data needs to be properly mapped both for the current legacy systems and where they’ll need to be in the new system.

As part of the discovery process, our team will have deep dive meetings with all key stakeholders to find out the data requirements of each team and map it accordingly. All this will go into the digital transformation strategy and defining a clear problem statement.

Visioning:

With all the discovery meetings concluded, our team will create a high-level vision of what the future state of your telco will be, called the 2.0 target end-state. 

This involves developing the operating model’s onstage and backstage.

Detailed Design:

Our team will then design workstreams and timelines to transit your telco brand from the legacy model to the new operating model. 

During this phase, we’ll focus on aligning further with your key stakeholders. The goal is to have clear success and error metrics as well as clearly defined roles and responsibilities for all parties.

Prep for migration:

During this phase, we’ll extract and clean data from your legacy systems and begin preparing it for the data migration.

Data migration risk mitigation strategies like using staging areas, scenario testing and rehearsals and having roll-back plans are all in place during this phase.

Phased migration:

Depending on your needs, this could be done in one shot, also known as a big bang migration, or done in phases with stability periods in between. Usually, phased migration can take around one year of the new platform going live.

Migration completion:

Depending on the plan, the legacy software can be retired within one year of the new operating system going live.

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Adopting a clean slate full-stack approach to digital transformation enables rapid transformation while seamlessly overcoming the challenges posed by legacy systems.

This overview highlights how our clean slate, full-stack approach effectively tackles planning, data migration, and software integration challenges, paving the way for a successful digital transformation.

Our experts are ready to share their insights and guide your teams through the process, helping to transform your telco into a techco.

Don't wait—contact us today to unlock the full potential of your digital transformation!

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