Ambition:
To compete and differentiate in a rapidly evolving environment Telcos need to offer agility and a fast time-to-market for customer facing services.
Core IT, namely the backend, needs to be robust and safe. Personal data is sensitive and shall never be compromised in favour of agility.
Problem statement:
Customer-facing IT is ‘hard-wired’ to backend systems due to shortcuts and tactical solutions made in the past. Therefore further development is time-consuming and costly. A radical simplification of the IT stack and its frontend capabilities (technology, process and skillsets) is required.
Direction:
The Need/Feed model
To achieve agility in customer facing IT without jeopardising core IT stability and security a clean separation of front- from the back-end is required.
- Frontend defines the data-need.
- Core-IT (backend) provides the data-feed.
There is no integration required. Sensitive logic is compiled by core IT and served to the front-ends.
Note:
The orchestration layer
In this overly simplified visualisation the orchestration layer is depicted as the ‘lid’ on core IT (normalisation, harmonisation, orchestration). In practice this layer could be much more versatile and act as an mediator between the agile and more waterfall development domains. A versatile orchestration layer can add intelligence and serve as a laboratory for front-end UX. The ‘conceptual’ flexibility of the orchestration layer will provide a foundation for iterative experiments in the front-end user experience (both in operational process and UX). Once your front-end teams arrive at a sustainable business logic or synergy, then the capability can be replicated underneath the orchestration in the Core IT domain.