- Most telecommunications companies are dealing with technical debt, according to some telecom experts
- Surprisingly, many workers at these companies bypass a lot of corporate software and just work with Excel spreadsheets
- Lumen Technologies, for one, is addressing the problem of its tech debt
Technical debt is akin to a very messy house — perhaps even a hoarder’s house — where someone other than the hoarder needs to take charge and clean things up. And telcos, which have some of the messiest houses, really need a helping hand.
Iain Nelson, director with the consulting firm Alix Partners, defined software technical debt as “anything that is not on a current or supported version that you would not necessarily want in your environment.”
Andrej Danis, partner and managing director with Alix Partners, added, “It’s not just that software might be outdated. Also, there is so much duplicate and partial software solutions. While individually they are still up to date, from the need of the company it’s not any more state of the art. It’s not suiting the operating model.”
After Lumen Technologies announced this week that it hired OneVizion to streamline its internal systems, Fierce Network wondered: How many other telecommunications companies are dealing with a lot of technical debt?
The answer? All of them, according to Danis. “We have been engaged by multiple of them,” he said.
Scott Robohn, co-founder of the Network Automation Forum, agreed, saying, “I don’t think it’s a Lumen-specific problem. If you think about the history of telcos, there have been all sorts of splitting up and integrations.” For instance, he noted that a number of years ago, Verizon sold some markets to Frontier Communications, and now it’s buying them back. “There are all sorts of data challenges related to that,” said Robohn.
He also noted T-Mobile is part of a joint venture that’s buying Lumos. While T-Mobile may currently have its software house in order — it uses OneVizion — it may have to deal with different software systems at Lumos.
On top of the fact that wired and wireless telecom operators have a lot of technical debt, many of them still use Excel spreadsheets to a surprising degree, according to OneVizion.
Robohn said, “In automation we talk about: you need a repository that serves as your source of truth. Many, many network operators will joke ‘our one source of truth is this spreadsheet.’”
And apparently there’s quite a lot of resistance at many companies to moving beyond Excel spreadsheets.
Robohn said, “In automation we talk about: you need a repository that serves as your source of truth. Many, many network operators will joke ‘our one source of truth is this spreadsheet.’”
Scott Robohn, Co-founder of Network Automation Forum
Danis and Nelson said oftentimes the IT department within a company will introduce a new software application, and business groups will extract all the data from that new application and export it back to Excel. Why in the world would they do this? Because they’re familiar with Excel and feel comfortable working with it. And their primary jobs are to meet business goals. Changing to a new software system is a big hassle. And often, they weren’t included in the discussions about buying the new software, anyway.
Danis said many times, “business and IT people not on the same page almost from the start.” He and Nelson said that major software cleanups cannot be led just by the IT department. They must be a collaboration between IT and the business groups.
In addition, John Patton, founder and chairman of the board of OneVizion, said in order to take on a project as large as the Lumen project it’s important for the OneVizion team to work in synch with the internal Lumen team.
“Absolutely, they must work hand in glove,” said Nelson. “They need to work very closely so Lumen gets the business processes they need.”
Danis said any major software transformation “needs to be a CEO-led operation, not tech driven. A lot of people will be impacted by this. This will not happen if it’s not mandated from the top.”
Bring in the dumpsters
So, how can companies begin to clean up their technical debt? Just like interventionists might bring in a couple of dumpsters to get rid of a hoarder’s junk, companies dealing with a bunch of technical debt will need to determine what’s worth keeping and what gets tossed.
Fierce asked if these software audits were super time-consuming. And Danis and Nelson said: not really.
They said software applications can be separated into categories, whether financial, project management, sales-focused, etc. Then experienced consultants can separate the wheat from the chaff in each category.
One side benefit is that cleaning out a lot of unnecessary software can save on licensing costs.
A company also needs to determine its overarching goals. Does it want to consolidate and build on top of what it has, or does it want a newer transformative system?
Either way, people will be a big factor in any effort to clean up technical debt. Danis said people must use the company-mandated software and input the data properly. And there will be resistance because their normal processes will be disrupted and they could even become redundant after new technologies are implemented.
“Ongoing wins are super critical,” said Danis. “Don’t wait for a big bang a year from now. You need demonstrated wins and successes that are felt and perceived.”
One thing that Danis, Nelson and Robohn all agree is that cleaning up technical debt and getting data in good working order is critical for companies that want to do anything with artificial intelligence (AI).
“If any telcos want to employ AI and train AI on their data, you need high integrity in the data you feed any model,” Robohn concluded.
