Viewpoint
Following their win at the World Communication Awards 2018, Total Telecom caught up with Huawei Technologies’ director of consulting and system integration, Mr Leiyong, to discuss the company’s successful partnership with Hong Kong Telecom
Last month, Huawei and Hong Kong Telecom were awarded the Digital Transformation award for their Project Earth initiative. The campaign overcame a number of key challenges to deliver a complete overhaul of HKT’s digital offering.
The WCA judges commended the pair’s efforts for their single-minded vision and provision of a future proofed, digital solution.
“I see in the companies’ plans the marks of a correct future vision. They are aware of the deep architectural changes that need to happen: true convergence, real-time responsiveness, cross-channel and cross-service design. A truly digital transformation initiative. This is an impressive end-to-end transformation programme,” the WCA judges said.
Project Earth
In partnership with Huawei, Hong Kong Telecom undertook an end-to-end transformation, named ‘Project Earth’ which aimed to cut across services, business process and all the way down to the network architecture.
The project’s aim was to deliver business and service centric focused customer experience excellence, removing inefficiencies which prevented the delivery of agile services across every layer.
Key Objectives
The service provider industry is undergoing a profound disruption, which is driving increased competitive dynamics and causing tepid revenue growth, shrinking margins and high churn. Rather than compete on price, HKT wanted to lead on customer experience to drive sustainable growth, reposition the business for new digital opportunities, and compete effectively against traditional and OTT players with superior levels of agility, cost and experience. The Project Earth was created to deliver that transformation to the digital native customers for a service centric experience.
Overcoming the challenges
HKT and Huawei worked collaboratively to transform the customer-centric experience from ‘Outside-in’ using the Human Centric Design Thinking methodologies and ‘Inside-Out’ from the Systems and Network design approach. For the Design Thinking portion Huawei collaborated with the company IDEO who are pioneers of Design Thinking taking a human-centered approach to innovation that integrates the needs of people, the possibilities of technology, and the requirements for business success.
The team together redesigned the business processes to optimise and elevate the user experience in which we at Huawei calls ROADS (Real-time, On-demand, All online, DIY, Social). This represents the most important characteristics of the digital customer experience for operators to win the heart of their customers, as HKT reinvent themselves as truly customer-centric organisations.
Looking to the future
Phase one of Project Earth has focused on the transformation of the Enterprise Customer Experience, which HKT was challenged to serve efficiently due to legacy, siloed systems which required intricate, inefficient and expensive manual and technology work-around. These challenges meant the Enterprise B2B part of the business suffered from limited product innovation, long provisioning cycles, customer satisfaction challenges, and scalability constraints which limited services to large enterprises and constrained the expansion into SME.
The Project Earth now enters into the next phase of the program where we will use the same approach of Human Centric Design Thinking methodology with the transformed BSS, OSS and Cloudified Network to extend the digital services across to the commercial segment such as fixed voice, broadband and data services. In addition HKT also plans to capture new business opportunity on digital services such as IoT and vertical business for the Hong Kong Market.
"We do acknowledge that Digital Transformation is being carried out on various breadth and depth with vendors towards many operators globally. We feel privileged in having the panel of judges in deciding on us for our extensive efforts in carrying out for this end to end digital transformation. We are humbled to be recognised by the thought leaders of the industry through this achievement. This award will continue to encourage us to contribute our key learnings and practices to help other operators globally in their Digital Transformation aspirations," said Huawei Technologies director of consulting and system integration, Mr Leiyong.
