I still remember when TM Forum Live! was hosted in Nice down on the French Riviera, and it was very much a business support system (BSS) show. The scope of conversations has expanded, and in 2022 the show relaunched in Copenhagen, Denmark, and re-branded itself as Digital Transformation World (DTW), and started to get into the telco to techco discourse, cloud-native, artificial intelligence (AI) and all of that. This year at DTW24-Ignite, AI was obviously front-and-center but those BSS roots are still there, so let’s maybe start there and work our way up and out. And along the way, maybe we can see if there’s anything we can learn from the city itself, a place that’s no stranger to transformation; about 1,000 years ago it was a fishing village and today it’s a cultural and economic hub known for, among other things, a strong culture of design.
Some commentary on design in general, then specifically about Danish design. This started to be a thing in the 19th century with the arts and crafts movement, itself a sort of reaction to the spreading Industrial Revolution—instead of mass-produced products of inconsistent, questionable quality forged in dangerous, inhospitable working environments, the idea was to focus on craftsmanship and quality, beautiful and functional items made by artisans working in more comfortable, humane settings. In Denmark, the arts and crafts movement yielded both simple and ornate items, but there was a consistent emphasis on high-quality natural materials, objects that reflected the maker’s individuality, and surely served a common purpose but without compromising pleasing aesthetics–buildings, ceramics, furniture, light fixtures, metalwork, lots of things you see and use everyday. This gave way in the mid-20th century to the Danish Modern movement which exemplifies what most people probably think of when and if they happen to think about Danish design. Clean lines, shapes that are simultaneously ergonomic and organic, and chairs. Lots and lots of chairs. Two of your heavy-hitters are Arne Jacobsen and Hans Wegner. Wegner had some good lines (pun intended), and here’s two: “The good chair is a task one is never completely done with,“ and, “I have always wanted to make unexceptional things of an exceptionally high quality.”
The way I read those quotes is that perfection is an unachievable state but you can always get closer to it. And there’s a certain type of abstract greatness, even pleasure, that comes along with doing something simple with so much mastery that the mastery somehow evaporates into the near-perfection of the thing. OK, so BSS. This is one of those things that no one wants but everyone needs. Given that, wouldn’t it be nice if at least it was functional and simple and easy to use and just…pleasing? Well, it isn’t. In practice, it’s a bunch of subsystems—customer relationship management (CRM) tools, billing and revenue management solutions that let you generate invoices and accept payments, order management capabilities, customer self-service portals, reporting and analytics related to customer behavior and usage, revenue assurance, fraud management, service activation, and on and on and on. All of that stuff that has to be there so that you can buy a phone, connect it to a network and pay a service provider so that the thing works. And the fact that the thing works is something of a miracle once you get a sense of the reality of how all that aforementioned shit is stitched together with middleware. BSS is easy to pick on, so I’ll continue to do that: it’s complex as all hell, it takes a long time to customize, integrate and update, it’s expensive, it’s slow which means the thing that most needs to respond to shifting customer demands is the least capable of doing it, it’s easy to get locked into one or two or dozens of vendors, and the usability of it all hinges more on workers knowing how to work around problems than it does on just working correctly because at least with the workarounds it does indeed work sometimes sort of.
Here are two personal stories about what the reality of BSS looks like from the user perspective. For a months-long period of time about two years ago, my mobile network operator kept sending me text messages offering me a promotion to upgrade to a phone I already had and a service plan that I’d been on for years. Anodyne enough but annoying and pointless. I returned from Copenhagen via Munich, then Houston, then to Fayetteville, Arkansas. So that was a Baltic Air flight operated by Lufthansa, followed by a United mainline trans-Atlantic, followed by a United flight operated by CommuteAir doing business as United Express. For the long flight, I’ve always got my eye out for a reasonable upgrade whether that’s paid or based on an upgrade instrument. I tried the upgrade instrument and could tell that wouldn’t work as soon as the upgrade list was published, so I pivoted. $272 for an 11-hour flight. That’s a no-brainer. I tried to do it in the app. Error message. So I called United, who I bought the whole trip from, to get it done. At the time I had called, I’d already checked into the Lufthansa-operated flight and my god did that throw a wrench into things. I talked to Susanne from United for well over an hour while she talked to her colleagues at the rate desk while they talked to their peers at Lufthansa all the while all of them rapidly typing away, interacting with software programs. Lots of moments hearing her say, “Huh…hmmm…not sure what that’s about…I’m going to put you back on hold.” It finally worked. It was a giant pain in the ass. I should be able to do it for myself through an app. But because I checked into that one flight, the whole system collapsed and a team of people had to essentially figure out how to trick a bunch of past-their-prime programs into letting me buy a thing that was offered up to me for sale. That’s all BSS BS.
So how do you fix it? How do we turn this god-awful Baroque pastel-colored silk and velvet perch of a chair that I wouldn’t be able to put half of my ass on because it’s tiny for some reason, into Wegner’s Wishbone Chair? The unfortunate answer, seemingly, is that we don’t. Because we practically and realistically can’t. So our best bet isn’t to fix it but to add a new thing meant to make the old things a bit better, but not really fix or replace them, which also unfortunately means adding another layer of technology. Here’s the sort of conceptual description that came up in several conversations I had during the show with vendors in the space: we’ve got to take all of the legacy BSS and put another abstraction layer on top of it where all of the disparate data is restructured and made more usable. And, the pitches went, while we’re in there, let’s put together a generative AI (gen AI) user interface that will let you, the operator, more easily, naturally interact with your data. Not sure what it says about me but two of these talks involved someone drawing a diagram a lot like the one I’ve recreated on a napkin (below). The idea is that you’ve got to keep what’s there but wrap it up in a new more functional way.
Why do that though? I got decent explanations about how to do it. But why add another layer of complexity to something already problematically complex in an effort to make it more simple? Because we have to, they said. Why though? Because those legacy systems are where the business logic is. But if you’re pulling the data up into this new layer, why not pull that business logic up too and get rid of the legacy? If you’re going to fix it why not fix it for good? Why not digitally transform this particular part of your world? The best and I think most candid answer I got came from a pair of smart guys who don’t necessarily have a dog in this race. Because software is both sticky and brittle. Once you put it in, it’s hard to get it out. And if you do try to unstick it, you might break something. And if you’ve got at least a quasi-predictable process that’s associated with how you make at least a quasi-predictable amount of money, your safest bet is to probably do nothing.
Back to our Danish Modern comparison, let’s revisit and expand on some of the core concepts, and look at how they do (or do not) relate to BSS. Simplicity and minimalism, so that’s a wash. Functionality and practicality…it certainly functions and the pieces are meant to do something with a purpose. Durability…I mean, these bits and bytes seem to have long outlasted their expected lifecycle so I guess that’s a check mark for durability. Timelessness. Durability and timelessness at a glance seem related but, in the context of BSS, I think we lose the thread.
One of the first sessions at the Bella Center was a two-hander from BT Chief Digital and Innovation Officer Harmeen Mehta and Consumer Chief Executive Marc Allera. The point, I think, was that the company’s consumer brand EE is now “new EE,” a converged technology company transformed to help its customers navigate the ever-changing world of technology. “It’s meant a really big house moving exercise,” Metha said. “It’s been a business transformation underpinned by the power of digital and the power of AI…It’s a real story of platform thinking…come to life…We’re shutting down 90% of our legacy and going to be running a new stack, a new model, powered by platform-thinking.”
Platforms are important, we’re told; examination to come. But Mehta’s comments around the broad modernization efforts that date back around three years are important. This is the hard work of digital transformation. But what does it mean for customers? Well, now in addition to buying your mobile and fixed services from EE, and the handsets and routers you need to use them, you can also buy smart home devices and gaming consoles. The takeaway here should be how amazingly complex it is to do something that seems relatively simple. But that’s kind of a microcosm of BSS; there’s also the macrocosm that goes beyond BSS and OSS to public cloud to on-prem data centers to radio sites to GPU clusters to to gen AI to…
This reminds me of another famous Dane, Hans Christian Anderson, an author whose legacy includes a number of fairy tales that are probably significantly more shocking and depressing than what you remember, but what you remember may itself be a highly-sanitized version of the original. Specifically, it brings to mind, “The Ugly Duckling.” You know the broad strokes. The mother duck, leading her brood to an old duck responded to criticism of the titular duckling. The older duck told mommy of the ugly duckling, “It’s a pity you can’t hatch him again.”
“That can’t be managed, your ladyship,” she responded. “He isn’t so handsome, but he as good as can be, and he swims just as well as the rest, or, I should say, even a little better than they do. I hope his looks will improve with age…I think he will be quite strong, and I’m sure he will amount to something.”
BSS and all the other nuts and bolts of making the whole thing work maybe aren’t the best looking thing in the world or the most interesting, but they have a part to play and it’s an important part to play. At DTW24—Ignite, there were practical, tactical discussions about how to do this and how to keep doing it in an effort to deliver long-term value to operators and their customers. There are a lot of smart people around who are working on this. Ideally, they can get from ugly duckling to beautiful swan and someday enjoy a moment like this one, from a translation of Anderson by Jean Hersholt. “He felt quite glad that he had come through so much trouble and misfortune, for now he had a fuller understanding of his own good fortune, and of beauty when he met with it…The lilacs dipped their clusters into the stream before him, and so shone so warm and so heartening. He rustled his feathers and held his slender neck high, as he cried out with full heart: ‘I never dreamed there could be so much happiness…’”
Now back to another great Dane, Jacobsen—famous for lots of things but one of them is the beautiful Swan Chair which is hopefully a lovely tribute to Anderson, and some of the smart things he said. “In the end, it’s not the appearance of a building that matters, but its fitness for purpose.” Another one: “To me, designing is like a constant search for perfection. A continuous improvement process.” Apply that to networks. They’re often messy, ugly even, but they also often get the job done, and it’s an important job, and sometimes, if you step back and think about what networks do for people and commerce, you can find some beauty there. And the people that make sure those networks get the job done, in my experience at least, are the kind of people who, like Anderson, Jacobson and Wegner, know that you’re never going to get to perfection but you can always keep getting closer to it. Copenhagen is a very appropriate place to have these discussions.
