Mobilizing the digital transformation

Twelve months in, we have taken two big bets. The first is that we focus exclusively on our customers in our markets, and do everything to make those markets successful, while accepting that we can only get leaner, more digital and more agile if we leverage five Ps across the group: our products, our processes, our platforms, the best global partners, and people whose competence scales across markets. Rather than reinventing the same thing many times over, we do it in a harmonised way. That produced a new Telia way of working, with market and customer focus on one side and the five Ps delivered across the company on the other, and it makes us a distinct setup compared with other operators, closer to what a Google or a hyperscaler looks like with a common production and product-technology core.

The second bet is the transformation itself. We communicated the targets to the capital markets in January rather than keeping them inside, and we said plainly that this is not a quick fix. We are changing the company fundamentally and structurally, across every market and every function, led by what our markets need and delivered across the four pillars. Think of it as a matrix of markets against transformational themes: product simplification, process harmonisation, a substantial uplift in analytics toward data-driven decisioning, a fundamental uplift of the service assurance backbone that gives us the orchestration experience we sell as a USP, and a digital IT transformation built with the TM Forum on standards and modular components, moving away from a huge number of customisations toward a common core we configure for each market.

Engagement and scale are what make it work. This is completely integrated into the operation and into the governance, because you cannot run a transformation on the side. The group executive management sponsors the themes. The goals cascade into initiatives, each detailed, each staffed by a leader named in person, each with an objective and key results, and thousands of people now work in them on top of their daily operations. And we created full visibility in a cockpit across the whole programme, so we spot early indicators of deviation and go in to help rather than discovering something too late. There is nothing on PowerPoint and nothing on Excel. We bring up the Jira dashboard, and it runs from the board of directors through the group executive to every team, end to end. There is no truth other than the actual truth on the ground.

The unique difficulty was doing it virtually. Both of us joined within sixteen months and had still not met the whole team in person, so the hardest part is knowing whether you are really taking people with you when there are no town halls, no bistros and no coffee machines. That took new engagement habits, including a regular ask-me-anything where I get bombarded with questions.

Two things worked. We refocused dramatically on a handful of strong partners across analytics, service assurance, IT and skills, because we cannot do this alone and too many suppliers meant none of them was strategic. And we embarked on a massive insourcing, because we have to be a software company, which means the core competence around software, analytics and user experience design belongs in our own operation and our own people rather than in someone else's hands. Bringing the brains back is also why we talk about this publicly: telco branding is not always great, and this is an amazing place to drive change.

What we ask of the industry is standards and modularity. The network side achieved it globally, which is why a 5G phone roams around the world, and we need the same standardisation and modularisation in the BSS, the OSS and the rest of the stack, so an operator can choose the best partner and run plug and play instead of a significant integration project every time.