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Time doesn’t stop, not even for growing up younger Benjamin Button. But just like him, Communication Service Providers (CSPs) must find a way to take the most of it and get increased agility and vital energy regarding network management, more commonly compatible with youth age.
Time brings know-how and expertise, trusted into the hands, eyes and mind of experienced people. However, they may tend to face standardisable incidents, compromising the availability to perform higher value-added activities. Here’s where automation plays the leading role of anti-ageing Benjamin, by providing timely and knowledgeable responses to network occurrences in a flexible and audacious way.
Despite the predictable nature of network alarms based on its repeatability and sense of causality, we shall consider two possible primary motivations in the Telecommunications industry to embrace automation:
- The complexity resulting from a growing number of clients and services provided, along with an increased traffic, which enlarges the number of domains and network elements, and ultimately the network management workload. Due to increasing costs, it figures untenable to scale workforce;
- Natural human limitations to cope with time pressures from within the industry, which hinders a more efficient service delivery.
On the other but complimentary hand, data is already considered the most valuable asset of the digital age, as companies try to figure out customer preferences and predict equipment faults, for instance. But all the data now available is worthless if organizations aren’t able to make sense of it.
Thanks to Analytics and Artificial Intelligence (AI) tools, namely Machine Learning, CSPs can increasingly put their data lakes to good use and capture value from the information they hold about networks, operations and customers. AI has created relevant use cases in this context – such as predictive maintenance, long-term network optimization, network planning and enablement to deployment automation –, which maps out the way for network virtualization and can bring significant increases in efficiency and network availability, leading to customer satisfaction.
Bearing this multi-layer impact in mind, a cultural and organizational shift is necessary, both for pushing people’s evolution from “data gathers” to “data users” – giving them time and space to think, create and innovate – and upgrading legacy systems to support such transformation.
In a nutshell, CSPs must assess the value of automation in their own network environments and match automation solutions with business outcomes. What figures paramount is understanding that maturity brings the urgency of innovation drivers and sometimes a deep rethinking of both BSS and OSS activities concerning automation – a necessary youth breath to remain relevant and competitive, even starting by small steps.
Learn more about Cognitive Automation on Celfocus’ White Paper.
