Clearing Hurdles to Just-in-Time Network Lifecycle Management

1) The strategy cycle sets budgets and design guidelines for the next several years.

2) The project creation cycle plans network augmentations and rearrangements over the next six to 18 months.

3) The network creation cycle implements the new network configuration, usually with a six-month time horizon. This is the primary area where value is created through a move to a JIT NLM process. Being able to “put capacity right on top of demand” for new services has the potential to save 2-5 percent of total capital expenditure for network creation, which often is in the range of a half-billion to a billion dollars per year.

4) The ongoing operation and maintenance cycle keeps the network up and working at peak efficiency. JIT processes here can provide an additional 40 percent reduction of the capex required for spares and repairs (usually about 5 percent of total capex in a year). Thus, a further 2 percent reduction in overall capex can be realized annually through JIT.

Hurdles to Just-in-Time NLM

As we’ve indicated, the hurdles for achieving JIT NLM — once a basic NLM infrastructure is in place — are centered on what the future network should look like. This is the domain of network planning, defined by the analyst firm OSS Observer as “the function that seeks to determine the current network configuration and projected future needs. It seeks to provide the necessary network resources, at the right time and place, to allow services to be provisioned, without uneconomic network overbuilding.”

The first two of the six hurdles to implementing JIT NLM are related to the low speed with which network planning is done at most service providers.

SPEED

Hurdle #1: Long, labor-intensive planning cycles

Hurdle #2: Disaggregated information among planners

Network planning is currently a very knowledge-intensive activity requiring highly skilled practitioners. Using rules-of-thumb and home-grown tools for network capacity planning, network architectures and what-if analyses, planning experts — usually several per technology and geographic area — create individual network plans for the strategy, project creation and network creation cycles, taking three to six months to complete each and providing no opportunity to evaluate changing market conditions after a project has been planned. This is increasingly an untenable practice. Last year, BT’s CIO for Technology Phil Dance said, “[There has been an] increase in the pace of change. [Network migrations are] not something you do every 20 years, or five years, or even two years — it is becoming a continuous process.”