How are leading telcos going about digital transformation?

How are leaders in the telco industry going about digital transformation? We speak to key thought leaders at Mobile World Congress Barcelona 2019 (MWC 2019) to hear their views about how their organisations have embraced digital transformation and what the ideal ‘digital transformation’ picture is to them.  This video interview features Marc Halbfinger of PCCW Global and Daichi Nozaki of SoftBank Group.

Marc Halbfinger (PCCW Global): PCCW Global is the international operating arm of HKT. HKT, domestically, is going through dramatic digital transformation in order to facilitate its end user base, both consumer and enterprise, effectively, by assuring that customers are increasingly able to self-provision the infrastructure that’s delivered to them.

PCCW Global too, as a provider of global network infrastructure is focusing on how to further automate using software defined networking and proprietary written code as well as cloud-based infrastructure to facilitate all forms of digital transformation. 

Underneath it all, we need to organise ourselves regularly and more smartly, perhaps as software providers more than we would as old network providers and as a result we’ve taken the decision in PCCW Global last year to migrate our entire organisation, not just DevOps or software into agile. And we are deploying to scale the agile framework throughout the organisation. It’s an ongoing process, and I think that the organisational behaviour as well as the focus on automation of tools for the end user is facilitating digital transformation.

Daichi Nozaki (SoftBank): We have an internal and external trial. Internal is utilising AI, RPA. We are trying to move 40% labour to new area instead of doing their day to day basic job. So that’s the internal trial in utilising new technology which is part of our portfolio.

Externally, we also formed the digital transformation department. We moved 100 people over there. This department is basically trying to create new business with the clients. So instead of selling something, they co-create something new like a business together, utilising new technology. That’s the digital transformation department.

So, the digital transformation is variant depending on the customer because everybody has different implications with the digital transformation. So that’s one of the reasons why we decided to create this department instead of a product-type of approach. Instead of doing that, we really wanted to create a new business model together with the customer utilising, leveraging technology instead of putting the technology first then finding out whether customers are going to buy or not.

So again, the ideal digital transformation will be varied depending on the customer.