Transformation revisited

TRANSFORMATION: TELSTRA

If there's a poster child for IT transformation, it's Telstra. First announced back in 2005, the effort — which also involved major network upgrades — reached its first major milestone in 2008, with the cutover of entirely new platforms for billing and customer management.

The new billing and customer relationship management (CRM) systems — provided by Amdocs, Comverse and Oracle/Siebel, among others — touch all aspects of Telstra's consumer and small business operations, serving by the end of 2008 more than 7 million customers in all. The new systems process more than 200 million network event records and 20 million call records each day. And while many IT system overhauls tackle one service at a time, Telstra's effort simultaneously addressed all of its service areas, allowing it to present customers with a true single bill, as well as have a single product file to provision new services.

“We had siloed systems — one for mobile, one for fixed line, one for broadband, one for pay TV — and we had a siloed approach to the market and how we managed our customers,” said John McInerney, chief information officer for Telstra. “Our No. 1 goal was to get rid of all those silos to enable us to sell and cross-sell much more effectively. That's where we are right now.”

If the system deployment itself was complex, migrating customers was perhaps an even bigger challenge. McInerney said his migration team identified customer data from more than 1200 different sources and 14 different legacy systems just to perform a single customer migration. The process was automated via more than 3400 business rules and 700 individual migration “jobs,” ultimately enabling Telstra to move up to 800,000 customers into its new CRM system in just a 12-hour period.

There were some hiccups. In November, Australian telecom unions complained that delays and errors in the new CRM system were causing business losses; Telstra execs said the systems were working fine and the company was working through any transition issues.

“The migration period was one of our most challenging,” McInerney said. “You can never do enough data cleanup; one of the biggest challenges is dropping in a new transformation system while trying to end an old one.”

Indeed, system retirement is a major goal of the effort. Telstra expected to retire almost 500 systems by the end of 2008. That number is expected to cross 1200 over the next two years, as the operator moves onto the operations support system (OSS) portion of its transformation — including new IP service assurance and fulfillment capabilities.

“One of the benefits we've seen is that we started our network, IT and business transformation all at the same time; we brought all the programs together and ran them as one end-to-end transformation program,” McInerney said. “[CEO Sol Trujillo] did not treat this as a program, but as a way of life.”

TRANSFORMATION: AT&T'S

AT&T is moving as quickly as any service provider to transform its network and operations. Telephony had the chance to conduct an e-mail exchange with Mark Francis, the service provider's vice president-global network operations center and one of its leading transformation thinkers. According to Francis, 2008 was “a momentous year “ in the evolution of AT&T's IP network, coupled with a growing recognition that the company needs to play within a larger “ecosystem” of companies as part of its corporate transformation.

Read a full Q&A with Francis at telephonyonline.com.