There are multiple factors expected to impact the telco operations team of the future. Some of these factors relate to the changing technologies used by the telco; for example, new hybrid networks will use IT software, over more traditional network- related technology. Also, the longer-term future often referred to as the “Fourth Industrial Revolution”, will provide a fusion of advances in artificial intelligence, robotics, the Internet of Things, quantum computing, and other technologies – these technologies will increasingly bring intelligent automation into the telco and the speed of doing business will increase. In addition, work culture is changing, and the employees of the future will require more job flexibility and a more supportive workplace.

Within the NOC/SOC, jobs which are routine and involve monitoring or performing repetitive tasks will disappear over time – with new jobs appearing that work with machines in new ways (for example, monitoring output quality) or managing the significant new complexity within ecosystems. The use of new automations will also help to mitigate the skills shortages that look set to be a feature in the short/medium term – as telcos transition their main functions into IT environments from more traditional networking environments.

In order to work efficiently in this new environment, humans will increasingly team up with machines. The human-machine relationship will, hopefully, be symbiotic: humans will work alongside machines and deal with non- standard problems that require human decision-making skills; also becoming increasingly involved in the development of machine reasoning for these machines. Machines will support humans with routine task completion, and will augment human decision making with data and intelligence; they will also be involved in the skills training of humans.

There are many new requirements for this environment, some of the most important top-level items are likely to be:

ADDITION OF “DECISION INTELLIGENCE”

This is a broad domain which describes the provision of models and automation to support humans in their day-to-day activities.

NEW DATA SETS

Machines and humans will start to consume a wider variety of data to understand situations more completely across the hybrid network – and as new automations are implemented, they will need richer data around problems to train and feed the models.

IMPROVED TRUST AND RISK PROGRAMS

The ongoing development of policies, procedures and technologies to deal with a steady stream of new requirements in the area of trust – this includes new guidelines and work in areas such as Explainable AI.

Companies need to understand and perform due diligence around topics such as value creation and risk minimization to better address the following:

• How do we best measure return on investment?
• What skills should telcos be building?
• What technologies will deliver real support for the most difficult problems encountered by staff?

The deployment of modern AIOps applications is one of the first steps towards supporting this new NOC/SOC team. AIOps provides automated analysis and remediation when potential service-impacting events are seen and ensures that teams are only presented with the most important issues.