Our client, a wholesale operator, wanted to leverage the opportunities offered by SDN (Software-Defined Networking) technology and thus meet new market expectations.
Challenge
It has chosen to develop one of its end-to-end connectivity offerings with the ambition of offering its customers a tailored service that allows:
- Immediate service delivery,
- Flexible pricing that adapts to the customer's needs,
- Improved customer experience through digital ordering.
For this purpose, he called upon Sofrecom in order to define the different scenarios to automate and digitalize its product by relying on SDN technology.
Methodology
Our experts first identified all the stakeholders to be involved in the project: marketing, legal, sales, network entities (architecture/deployment), IT development... and the issues to be addressed for each of these stakeholders.
At the end of this scoping phase, they set up a governance plan based on:
- Several streams with their dedicated authorities,
- Regular steering committees to align the different streams and to validate the completion of key milestones (from opportunity to architecture phase),
- The implementation of a one-roof, allowing to bring the project team closer together and to facilitate exchanges.
Our team was soon faced with a major challenge: since SDN is a relatively new technology, project team members did not all have the same level of maturity and knowledge on the subject.
Therefore, our team accelerated the pace of training on the subject, particularly on the controller and orchestrator components of an SDN solution.
Another challenge concerning the digitization of the customer journey: to take full advantage of the automation set to be offered by SDN technology, it was necessary to rethink customer experiences as well as various processes (order taking, order feasibility study, invoicing, network inventory update…).
However, our client’s IS assessment quickly revealed that it was not possible to move swiftly to 100% digital. Several IS modernization projects (customer interface, billing system, etc.) were launched, but they were not all at the same level of maturity.
Our team studied and calculated several scenarios:
- from the "first steps" scenario based on the digitization of the most rapidly achievable elements, while allowing to deliver an offer in line with the MVP defined by the MKT stream,
- to the scenario of indepth transformation requiring several years.
Result
Strengthening governance has been a key factor in bringing together and aligning stakeholders in the project.
At the end of the project, our client now has:
- In-depth feasibility studies for each of the streams (technical, marketing, process, legal...),
- A product backlog and the definition of the Minimum Viable Product (MVP),
- Different scenarios with figures to operate the digitalization of the offer,
- An end-to-end architecture integrating SDN components.
Our customer has also realized that in order to take full advantage of the automation and flexibility enabled by SDN technology, they need to accelerate the digital transformation of their IS.
