Building the learning telco

Organisational learning is key to telcos’ success in the Coordination Age

Developments in technology and organisational digital transformations increased the pressure on learning and development (L&D) departments in telcos. L&D departments, many of which were compliance-focused, were tasked with upgrading telcos’ entire skills inventories to ensure that workforces were fit for new ways of working (e.g. AT&T’s “Workforce Reskilling” effort announced in 2016).

What was perhaps under-appreciated initially was that the need for L&D would not go away:

  • Telcos continue to operate in dynamic environments that are inherently unstable (e.g. pandemics, climate crises, new and evolving technologies);
  • Traditional telco revenue streams have remained under pressure, requiring new and innovative thinking to identify opportunities for growth.

The VUCA acronym (first coined in 1987) – standing for volatility, uncertainty, complexity, ambiguity – provides a useful framework to describe the current telco environment.

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The telco’s highly VUCA environment

learning telco

Source: STL Partners

Telcos have made changes to organisation structures in order to accommodate this reality, e.g. “flattening” the organisation and decentralising decision-making to accelerate the pace at which organisations can take action (absorb change and innovate).

Additionally, they are recognising the importance of learning to this process. Workforce skills must remain relevant and collective corporate intelligence must evolve to decide and inform winning strategies.

This type of “organisational learning” requires conscious efforts on the part of both the organisation and individual employees. It is not enough to make L&D the sole responsibility of an L&D team, or an HR department and to task them with identifying appropriate content and courses to push out to employees.

Organisations need to foster an environment where learning is encouraged and enabled in pursuit of organisational improvement, customer satisfaction, innovation and growth. After all, it is impossible to improve/do something new without learning in the first instance. Learning tools, processes and practices are required – and barriers to learning should be removed.

Learning barriers can include:

  • L&D teams creating bottlenecks to learning (e.g. restricted course access)
  • The existence of knowledge silos
  • Beliefs that “knowledge is power”
  • A lack of clear goals around using knowledge/new capabilities for improvement (i.e. learningto create behaviour change)
  • No incentives for individuals or teams to engage in learning
  • Uncertainty about processes for capturing and sharing learning
  • Fear of failure inhibiting trials in order to learn something new.

This report considers the key practices associated with organisational learning and identifies lessons from telcos who are progressing towards becoming a learning organisation.

Table of contents

  • Executive Summary
  • Introduction
  • The value of organisational learning
  • Enabling organisational learning
    • Types of learning in organisations
  • Organisational learning in practice
    • Learning as an organisational priority
    • Identifying learning purpose
    • Content-based learning
    • Person-led learning (knowledge sharing)
    • Process-led learning
    • Trial, reflection and practice
    • Recognition and rewards for learning
  • Towards learning organisations
    • Findings
    • Evaluation
  • Conclusions
  • Index

Related Research

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Driving the agility flywheel: the stepwise journey to agile

Agility is front of mind, now more than ever

Telecoms operators today face an increasingly challenging market, with pressure coming from new non-telco competitors, the demands of unfamiliar B2B2X business models that emerge from new enterprise opportunities across industries and the need to make significant investments in 5G. As the telecoms industry undergoes these changes, operators are considering how best to realise commercial opportunities, particularly in enterprise markets, through new types of value-added services and capabilities that 5G can bring.

However, operators need to be able to react to not just near-term known opportunities as they arise but ready themselves for opportunities that are still being imagined. With such uncertainty, agility, with the quick responsiveness and unified focus it implies, is integral to an operator’s continued success and its ability to capitalise on these opportunities.

Traditional linear supply models are now being complemented by more interconnected ecosystems of customers and partners. Innovation of products and services is a primary function of these decentralised supply models. Ecosystems allow the disparate needs of participants to be met through highly configurable assets rather than waiting for a centralised player to understand the complete picture. This emphasises the importance of programmability in maximising the value returned on your assets, both in end-to-end solutions you deliver, and in those where you are providing a component of another party’s system. The need for agility has never been stronger, and this has accelerated transformation initiatives within operators in recent years.

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Concepts of agility have crystallised in meaning

In 2015, STL Partners published a report on ‘The Agile Operator: 5 key ways to meet the agility challenge’, exploring the concept and characteristics of operator agility, including what it means to operators, key areas of agility and the challenges in the agile transformation. Today, the definition of agility remains as broad as in 2015 but many concepts of agility have crystallised through wider acceptance of the importance of the construct across different parts of the organisation.

Agility today is a pervasive philosophy of incremental innovation learned from software development that emphasises both speed of innovation at scale and carrier-grade resilience. This is achieved through cloud native modular architectures and practices such as sprints, DevOps and continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) – occurring in virtuous cycle we call the agility flywheel.

The Agility Flywheel

agility-flywheel

Source: STL Partners

Six years ago, operators were largely looking to borrow only certain elements of cloud native for adoption in specific pockets within the organisation, such as IT. Now, the cloud model is more widely embraced across the business and telcos profess ambitions to become software-centric companies.

Same problem, different constraints

Cloud native is the most fundamental version of the componentised cloud software vision and progress towards this ideal of agility has been heavily constrained by operators’ underlying capabilities. In 2015, operators were just starting to embark on their network virtualisation journeys with barriers such as siloed legacy IT stacks, inelastic infrastructures and software lifecycles that were architecture constrained. Though these barriers continue to be a challenge for many, the operators at the forefront – now unhindered by these basic constraints – have been driving a resurgence and general acceleration towards agility organisation-wide, facing new challenges around the unknowns underpinning the requirements of future capabilities.

With 5G, the network itself is designed as cloud native from the ground up, as are the leading edge of enterprise applications recently deployed by operators, alleviating by design some of the constraints on operators’ ability to become more agile. Uncertainty around what future opportunities will look like and how to support them requires agility to run deep into all of an operators’ processes and capabilities. Though there is a vast raft of other opportunities that do not need cloud native, ultimately the market is evolving in this direction and operators should benchmark ambitions on the leading edge, with a plan to get there incrementally. This report looks to address the following key question:

Given the flexibility and driving force that 5G provides, how can operators take advantage of recent enablers to drive greater agility and thrive in the current pace of change?

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Table of Contents

    • Executive Summary
    • Agility is front of mind, now more than ever
      • Concepts of agility have crystallised in meaning
      • Same problem, different constraints
    • Ambitions to be a software-centric business
      • Cloudification is supporting the need for agility
      • A balance between seemingly opposing concepts
    • You are only as agile as your slowest limb
      • Agility is achieved stepwise across three fronts
      • Agile IT and networks in the decoupled model
      • Renewed need for orchestration that is dynamic
      • Enabling and monetising telco capabilities
      • Creating momentum for the agility flywheel
    • Recommendations and conclusions