OPERATIONS TRANSFORMATION FORUM 2018: Hong Kong operator HKT and Huawei jointly opened the Digital Transformation Practice Centre (DTPC) to share experiences learned during HKT’s evolution, with the aim of helping other operators explore options and build capabilities for their own transformation.

“There is no single way of doing things, but we’d like to share what we’ve done, and by sharing we can accelerate the digital transformation in the telco industry. Because our competitor is not the traditional telco, our competitor is more the external competitors like the OTTs, who can do things much faster,” said Henry Wong, head of strategic wireless technology and core networks at HKT (pictured).

At DTPC, a cross-function agile team consisting of operators, end-users, Huawei and third-party partners will focus on transformation plans through five stages: Envisioning; Ideating; Prototyping; Realising; and Scaling.

Derry Li, VP of Huawei Consulting and Systems Integration, said it is “not uncommon to find fear of failure” among the minds of operators. Other factors to address include lack of best practice, mismatched capabilities, long timeframes and high costs.

Wong said there are “quite a few operators” interested in talking to HKT. A “soft launch” had already taken place at Mobile World Congress this year, with knowledge sharing taking place prior to the opening of the dedicated centre.