But when your whole industry sees a dramatic shake up, how do you build on momentum to win in the market?

In the last few years, the telecoms industry has seen demand grow like never before. Unlike other industries, Communications Service Providers have stepped up and kept the world together during a period of unprecedented global volatility. But what now? In an environment of compressed transformation and exponential demand, it’s imperative that CSPs balance present needs with reimagining the communications experience.

What’s needed is a profound shift from delivering efficiency and revenue through commodity products and services to unleashing the power of data for innovative products and services, that change how people live and how businesses function. The starting point is balancing technology, human ingenuity, processes and data in an intelligent operating model. The method to achieve this is to look at operational maturity as a whole.

In a recent study, we found that achieving the highest level of maturity possible means that some organizations become “future-ready.” And on average, organizations we found to be future-ready showed a 2.8x boost in corporate profitability and 1.7x higher efficiency than those at lower maturity levels. Future-ready organizations—which are just 7% of all the organizations surveyed across industries—also outperform others, improving the talent mix and reskilling as well as in customer experiences and ecosystem relationships.

To become future-ready, incremental change and a transactional focus are not enough. To move to this stage, CSPs must truly transform operations, rethinking the human+machine balance. This means that they are insight-driven and proactively improving performance across teams, processes and functions using technologies like artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) to be more predictive. However, of all the potential gains from moving from one maturity level to the other, the greatest come from the shift up from the predictive level to future-ready.

While a small percentage of CSPs are future-ready today, they have high aspirations for their ability to become future-ready in three years.

Percentage of Communications Respondents achieving each level of operational maturity three years ago, today, and three years in the future (expected).

Our research indicates that CSP executives think they have made significant progress in recent years in operations maturity. Cross-industry comparisons reveal that Communications outpaces all other industries in predictive operations. Many CSPs have invested heavily in their Operations Support Systems (OSS) and understand the need to use data analytics solutions to drive efficiency and gain insight into potential business challenges.

While it’s clear a strategic pivot is in order, CSPs are not making it fast enough. Too many are still developing capability-focused strategies centered on moving data rather than on unleashing what data can do for their customers and business.

While most CSPs have made progress in improving operations maturity to reach the predictive state, there is more to do. And fast.

With future-ready operations, CSPs will have the operational foundation they need to elevate every business decision, realize sustainable growth and deliver breakthrough network-based products and services.

Our research has shown if you fast-track the journey, your operations can become a true catalyst for competitive advantage. And, along the way, you can elevate your business decisions to realize tangible, sustainable, transformational value and growth.