"Concept of One, Concept of Zero"
Key to driving the systems transformation was Eslambolchi's Concept of One and Concept of Zero. The Concept of One addressed the approach of collapsing a group of systems into one. This concept drove the effort to vastly reduce legacy and redundant systems. The Concept of Zero promoted the move toward zero defects and near-zero cycle time through end-to-end process automation.
Eslambolchi also introduced the Concept of None, a fully autonomic computing environment, which he believed we were close to realizing with today's emerging cloud capabilities.
Having reflected on the transformation effort, Eslambolchi, who is now chairman and CEO of Divvio, offers the following as his "Top 10 Successful Transformation Initiatives":
- Adopt the Concept of One, Concept of Zero and, ultimately, Concept of None: One organization, one system, one process, one solution and one owner.
- Accountability and responsibility must be clearly established.
- Establish clear, simple targets and goals: one or two at each level that are tightly linked.
- Data collection and measurements are paramount, so is documentation.
- Defect management is the key to continuous improvement.
- The 80/20 philosophy: focus on 80% of the opportunities to improve and then shift focus.
- Continuously demonstrate success - success will breed success and build confidence.
- Expect resistance to change and to be held to high standards.
- Follow through - don't expect what you don't inspect.
- Know exactly where you want to go, what you want to achieve, when you want it to happen and stay committed.
Eslambolchi believes transformation starts with a focus on customer experience and a few clearly understood goals. He supports TM Forum's leadership in making this happen and believes it is uniquely positioned to lead the industry in understanding and driving change. He is particularly supportive of the Forum's Business Benchmarking program that allows providers to compare their effectiveness against their peers.
Rob Rich is managing director of the TM Forum Insights Research
This article originally appeared on TM Forum's Inside Leadership newsletter
One of the most important efforts was to improve the quality of the data describing the network. AT&T implemented a highly accurate single logical and physical database of records, enabling large reductions in fulfillment cycle times, lower costs and greatly reduced billing problems.