Reinventing the communications business for growth

We are the leading provider in the Nordics and Baltics, one of the most digitised regions in the world, which means demanding customers, and we sit next door to Ericsson and Nokia, so co-innovation comes easily. Two and a half years ago we started a transformation meant to be one of the most ambitious in the industry, running from network modernisation, now close to eighty percent 5G coverage across the footprint, through to the IT transformation that builds the digital core.

The digital core is where it starts, and it is a fallacy to think transformation is ever over. What we need as organisations is for transformation to become part of the DNA, always learning and improving. Simplified into two words, the strategy is simplify and scale. Simplify means becoming the aggregator of choice for connectivity and the digital services beyond it, which we mostly deliver with and through partners, and it applies to the product portfolio, the processes, the platforms, how we run with our people and how we run with our partners: the five Ps. Scale means not reinventing the wheel across markets. The same network configuration, the same products, the same platforms, the same partners. That gives us a better strategic engagement, better efficiency and better prices to pass on to the customer.

Talent is the people P and probably the most important of the five. We have embarked on a major upskilling initiative to create cloud fluency, analytics fluency and automation fluency, so everyone in the organisation understands the potential and can apply it themselves. With AWS we launched the region's largest cloud upskilling programme, and ten percent of our workforce is in training and certification for cloud as we speak, for product development and for the sales and service people alike.

The security landscape is changing what large and public-sector customers ask us for, and they ask the provider of critical infrastructure. Where talent met that demand we have seen real innovation in dedicated networks. With the military in Norway we built a critical 5G network you can carry in a backpack and set up where an incident demands it, connected back into the macro network so communication stays seamless. It is live, and it is the sort of thing that comes out of a customer need, our own talent and a partner in the same room.

The hardest part is not the digital core. It is starting from the customer experience we intend to deliver and deriving the capabilities from it, for consumer, mid-market and large enterprise alike: how we talk to a customer online, how we acquire, how we convert, how we service along the value chain. Those capabilities then come from the five Ps in a modular way. And it takes change management, because people have to unlearn old behaviours and old systems they have grown used to, which cannot be underestimated.

An ecosystem works on two conditions. Value attributed fairly, in proportion to the value each member generates. And clarity in the interfaces, down to the API, so a partner product plugs in rather than gets integrated. Increasingly that integration reaches into the customer's own IT and business processes rather than stopping at a portal, which is why end-to-end service assurance across every layer is what we are really selling.