Does business process automation really mean change?

For telecom operations professionals, the quest for well-defined and aligned business processes that are automated end to end has been happening for at least 25 years. Framing today’s process automation debate is the idea that our understanding of what constitutes a process is changing, as we explore in this excerpt from the report Process automation: an evolutionary approach to digital transformation.

The TM Forum Open Digital Architecture (ODA) seeks to align systems and business processes, decompose processes and tasks according to a well-defined Business Process Framework, and expose and integrate systems functions with Open APIs. Rooted in digital transformation, this approach reimagines processes and replaces legacy systems rather than repairing or augmenting them.

“If you’re just automating the existing process to improve it, you’re using an approach that drags the old process forward,” says George Glass, CTO, TM Forum.

Digital transformation aims to help communications service providers (CSPs) move toward a zero-touch future where an operations process becomes an on demand function, existing as an exception loop that asks humans for help to solve rare cases.

In the world of robotic process automation (RPA), by contrast, the starting point is the existing business process, with a focus on freeing humans from tedious interactions with systems. As RPA gains broader adoption, it’s increasingly harnessing analytics to capture processes based on key data points, analyze them and recommend improvements. Soon AI will enable the creation of new bots that can make improvements autonomously.

Easing integration & automating processes

Systems of differing vintage and origin cannot communicate without assistance. The TM Forum Business Process Framework sets out to bring order and a common language to CSPs’ data and processes, deriving from an ongoing need to integrate new and legacy systems.

“The [Business Process Framework] is important from an integration point of view,” says Luqman Shantal, CEO, Makman Consulting, because “even if you automate, if you do not use a process classification framework with common naming it would be difficult for APIs to understand each other, and interoperability would be very difficult.”

In the processes document, each process has been broken down into its constituent parts with its dependencies defined along with its place in the process hierarchy. The Business Process Framework allows each part of a process to be identified, measured, and potentially automated. And because it is a process framework, it acts a guideline and provides a common language rather than specifying implementation.

“When you build a set of IT systems, encapsulate them and expose them as standard set of services, you have to link services together to build a customer experience or journey, and you can’t do things randomly,” explains Glass. “There’s a logic and a sequence to follow.” The Business Process Framework provides CSPs with a basis for that logic and sequencing.

Understanding the processes

Examples of processes defined by the Business Process Framework include: The ODA leverages the Business Process Framework because “even in the ODA, you still need that taxonomy and architecture,” says Shantal.

ODA helps CSPs align systems and processes to achieve API-based automation and integration. At the time of writing, 61 CSPs worldwide cited ODA as a “preferred requirement” in relevant RFPs (requests for proposal).

“The ODA is transforming these end-to-end process flows to become cloud native-ready,” explains Shantal, which also “provides more relevant context than ever for RPA.”

• Customer order handling – accept and issue orders, determine feasibility pre-order, credit authorization, order issuance, order status and tracking, customer update on order activities and customer notification on order completion
• Configure & activate resource – configure and activate the specific resources allocated against an issued resource order
• Diagnose service problem – identify the root cause of the specific service problem
• Repair/replace failed resource – repair, reconfigure or replace the failed unit or specific resource; also reports successful restoration of normal operation or an unsuccessful attempt at restoration to Track & Manage Resource Trouble

Zero-touch automation

Many CSPs have an end goal of zero-touch automation for most operations and business processes. In zero-touch operations, “processes should be exception-based rather than part of the delivery,” says Harpreet Singh, Senior Digital Products Strategy Manager, TELUS.

Singh argues that processes often come about “because systems don’t talk to each other efficiently or don’t talk at all.” Aligning systems and processes with objectives can result in tremendous efficiencies like “50% reductions in interval times for complex services, which have traditionally taken months to deliver, by keeping communication between systems clean and efficient,” he says. He adds, however, that because many organizations can be strapped for capital, many projects remain unfunded.

In contrast, RPA provides low implementation costs and high short-term operational benefits. Transformation programs that aim for zero-touch automation typically plan to minimize and retire legacy systems.

“It’s not just about making today’s processes better and quicker,” says Glass. “If you’re a telco trying to do digital transformation, then putting something that acts like an automated human across the top of a set of technically inadequate or inflexible legacy systems means you’ve automated a constrained process and still have the inherent problems associated with your legacy systems.”

Nevertheless, RPA, AI and bot-based integration are on the rise, despite being based on legacy system processes.

Where are people in the process?

Even though many processes depend on people, human factors can be the most overlooked aspect of process improvement, says Vicky Sleight, Global Director, Human Factor and Diversity & Inclusion, TM Forum.

“Processes should be inclusive and diverse, but we tend to think about people afterward, even though people are the up-front piece,” she says.

Sleight argues that as CSPs transform their processes by any method, they mostly do so within an ethical framework that addresses accountability as people work alongside bots and other new technologies, like AI. When AI is used for hiring, for example, it could be trained using a decade of historical data only to learn “a red-haired female has never been in that position,” Sleight explains. “The results are only as good as the data you put in, so someone must be accountable for that black box,” she says.

Many enterprises, including CSPs, “still have a mentality of ‘just let us buy the technology’,” says Makman Consulting’s Shantal. “They will focus on the boxes – it’s just that these new boxes are digital,” he says, adding that CSPs should focus more on human factors, like giving business units methodologies to follow, defining what their digital maturity goals should be, and allocating budget for process and human factors.

Sleight notes a key threat CEOs face is a lack of people skilled in new technologies. CSPs are struggling “not just to acquire them, but to have the right culture to keep them,” she says, explaining that overall, technical talent is moving away from telecom to pursue more lucrative or speculative opportunities in other markets.

At the same time, the industry faces a looming retirement cliff. CSPs need to “change the image of this industry and make it attractive,” Sleight says, which means creating the more inclusive type of culture where people are given “tools to determine some of their own destiny” and in which “game changers” are embraced rather than “run out of the business for being too disruptive. Read the full report to find put more.