How Telia is harnessing the ODA to simplify and scale

Few of us are greenfield operators, and even a greenfield accumulates technical debt, product debt and platform debt quickly. So we were clear from the start about simplifying our offering and the platforms underneath it. We defined the few products and platforms we would invest in, the ones our customers actually demand, and named the legacy we would remove. Then we made it a core KPI and reported it, from the beginning, to analysts and to the capital markets. Three years on, fifty percent of the legacy products and fifty percent of the platforms are gone. Not a hundred, and a long way travelled. It is a precondition for simplifying the customer processes and for taking out the cost underneath. The other side of that KPI matters as much: we track how far we scale the target products, because removing a product only works if the customer on it has somewhere better to go.

On partners we started with real complexity and a portfolio that had grown tactically. We stepped back, asked who our strategic partners actually are, and created more scale with fewer of them and a much more intimate relationship. That gave us cost synergies which mattered in the restructuring, and it let us drive roadmaps forward together. We were also demanding: complying with the open digital architecture and the standard APIs became a precondition of working with us, so components would fit our target architecture and plug in rather than be integrated.

That takes a push, because a vendor whose product becomes the same Lego block as everyone else's naturally worries about differentiation. Differentiation should never sit in the interfaces. It sits in the performance of the product, in efficiency, and in the price we pay. Time nobody spends on an integration project is time spent on capability, and as an ecosystem we are cheaper, faster and better when the components simply fit.

People are by far the most important of the five Ps. Our people have been progressive and open through three years that were not always easy. The work with them has three parts: organisational clarity, so accountability for a domain is explicit and capabilities plug into local market needs; training and certification, in the architecture and APIs and in cloud and analytics, which is continuous; and communication, saying what we are doing and why, because standards, ecosystem collaboration and a lower cost base are things people understand and get excited about.

We never called it a burning platform. We were clear about three numbers instead. Our structural cost, because we had not been a digital telco with a lean cost base and automated processes that run without hands on deck. Our customer experience, because zero touch from discovery to try to buy to pay to care, and on to incident management, was not what we delivered and in places still is not. And the top line, because B2B in particular has to generate value. Being open about all three is what rallied people around why we were making the effort at all.

Phase one laid the foundation and it is mentally concluded. The next phase is scale: scale the platforms and products, scale capabilities like customer value management to drive more top line, and get the cost benefit down to the structural line, which is harder while a target and a legacy estate run in parallel. And customer experience will keep turning, because handling time in B2B in Sweden has gone from weeks to minutes.

Growth comes from three directions. On consumer, customer value management putting the right offer in front of the right customer, and value-added services at good margin. On B2B, becoming the provider of choice a customer can trust, assembling our services and third-party services modularly with the assurance, security and resilience a large or public customer needs. And on the network, monetising network functions, because we have spent a great deal on 5G and have not yet seen the return, and networks are becoming software functions like any other software service.

Three things I would tell a peer. Be clear on direction and on the KPIs that track it, so investment goes into the target rather than into legacy. Expect it to take time, because an infrastructure-heavy business with history cannot move like a small software company, and that takes stamina. And collaborate as an industry, because we share the same pains, and every euro not spent on interfacing components is a euro available for customer experience.