As the curtains close on Appian World, it's evident that technology and strategy are at the forefront of the telecommunications industry. I had the pleasure of conversing with Moutie Wali, Director of Technology Strategy at TELUS Communications, who provided profound insights into the evolution of this iconic Canadian brand.
Introducing TELUS: A Canadian Titan with a Global Reach
TELUS, a household name in Canada, is recognized as one of the largest telecommunications providers, offering a plethora of services including TV, home internet, and mobility. Recently, TELUS has expanded its portfolio to include health IT services, becoming Canada's largest IT healthcare provider. This includes innovations in electronic medical records and telemedicine. Further broadening their horizon, TELUS International was launched a decade ago, marking the company's foray into global IT digitization across 20 countries. Additionally, TELUS has ventured into agriculture, supporting the food supply chain with software solutions—a testament to their diverse and expanding portfolio.
Strategic Partnerships and Innovation at TELUS
Our discussion unveiled TELUS’s strategic partnership with Appian, initiated six years ago when TELUS was in search of a robust workflow solution to bolster their 5G deployment. The partnership flourished, with the development of Maestro—a system designed for wireless organization workflows. Since its inception, TELUS has implemented numerous applications across the company, enhancing operational efficiencies and the employee journey through integrated planning and centralized teams.
The Power of Appian in Simplifying Complex Processes
TELUS’s journey with Appian is a compelling story of transformation. The company has adeptly utilized Appian to streamline complex business processes both internally and externally. Moutie highlighted the significant improvements in their planning processes, where the cycle of creating comprehensive plans reduced from six months to under three months. This agility allows TELUS to adapt swiftly to changes, reinforcing a proactive approach in their strategic planning.
Leveraging AI and Future Aspirations
Looking ahead, TELUS is poised to integrate AI into their systems to further enhance decision-making and self-serve analytics. The potential to run multiple planning scenarios through AI will enable TELUS to evaluate various strategies efficiently, ensuring optimal outcomes for the organization. This forward-thinking approach underscores TELUS's commitment to maintaining a competitive edge in the telecommunications sector.
Advice for Embracing Low-Code Solutions
Reflecting on the adoption of low-code platforms, Moutie advises other telecom providers to allow business teams to take ownership of technological innovations. Low-code platforms democratize the development process, enabling teams to articulate requirements and address challenges effectively without heavy reliance on IT departments. This shift not only accelerates development but also fosters a culture of innovation and responsiveness within the organization.
TELUS’s Journey Towards Technological Excellence
TELUS’s narrative at Appian World highlights a journey marked by strategic foresight, innovative partnerships, and technological prowess. As TELUS continues to evolve and expand its influence both domestically and internationally, their story serves as an inspiring blueprint for other companies in the telecommunications and IT sectors aiming to navigate the complexities of modern technology and market demands.
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Speaker 1:
And I'm here at the last day of Appian World with TELUS, a great Canadian company and brand Moody. How are you? I'm good. How are you, Evan, Good? Nice to see you. It's been quite a week. Yes, Maybe introduce yourself and for those few Americans maybe who don't know TELUS, give us a little bit of history?
Speaker 2:
Absolutely so. I'm Moody Wally. I'm Director of Technology Strategy at Telus, and Telus is one of the largest telecommunications providers in Canada. We essentially provide services for consumer and business telecommunication products essentially, such as TV, home internet, mobility, wireless. But Telus has expanded its portfolio recently and now we offer health IT services. Thales is now the largest IT healthcare provider in Canada and this includes things like electronic medical records, telemedicine and so on. And I think 10 years ago we expanded globally, internationally, with Thales International, which is an IT digitization development company that has access to 20 countries around the globe, and then also, I think five years ago, we started looking into agriculture. So TELUS supports the food supply chain with software as a service solutions, which is interesting, diverse portfolio for a company based in Canada.
Speaker 1:
Yeah, I had no idea. I mean, I knew of TELUS as a great Canadian company, but it sounds like you have colleagues and do business all over the world. Absolutely, now we do. Wow, that's fantastic. Well, I did hear about your partnership with Appian and the great work you're doing. Maybe describe for folks that partnership what it looks like, how it works and the goals.
Speaker 2:
Yes, we started with Appian six years ago, so I was actually invited at Appian World in 2019. This is when I first came across Appian. We were looking for a workflow solution and the idea at the time, with the RFP that we started initiating, was we will buy an off-the-shelf solution to support our deployment efforts for wireless. We knew that with the 5G deployment, we have to scale quite rapidly and we needed something that allows us to track the deployment and the implementation of our towers, our systems, our records and our upgrades. And at the beginning we were not thinking about Appian. We wanted to buy a solution that we'd actually adopt. Appian wanted to buy a solution that would actually adopt. But Appian had an interesting perspective of how they support workflow and how they evolve and how they grow in terms of potential and really loved the offering of Appian at the time.
Speaker 2:
And we built our first system, I think five years ago. We called it Maestro, which is our system for workflow and deployment for the wireless organization, for workflow and deployment for the wireless organization. But since then we deployed more than a dozen different applications across the organization and half of those were with direct involvement from my team, the one that you probably saw this morning or yesterday morning is related to my role for integrated planning and the mandate that I recently had, and it's something that we're very proud of, specifically when we talk about driving the change and iterating through a change in the organization, and I can talk a little bit more about that.
Speaker 1:
Yeah, there's a lot there. The presentation was really fascinating, so maybe fast forward to the end. How did it simplify what is a pretty complex business process internally and you also use this with your clients? Absolutely so. It's internal and external.
Speaker 2:
Internal and external. My focus was on the internal aspect of Appian and how we use it to drive a better employee journey in terms of processes, in terms of outcome. A better employee journey in terms of processes, in terms of outcome. 18 months ago, the company decided to reorg and allow the planning to be with one centralized team, and that's my team. We look at planning for both wireless and wireline together, given the overlap that these systems are starting to see, and we wanted to have a combined, comprehensive, cohesive view of planning for the future. And this is what we mean by planning is what investments, what demand, what capital do we need to support the future success of Telus?
Speaker 2:
And when I start mapping the different functions of planning across all the different teams that require to contribute to that, I found that each team has their own micro workflow. Every team will have an Excel sheet or a system of record or even exchange data manually. So we needed to digitize all of that, but not only this. There were many dependencies between the teams, so one team would be an output or produce an output to another team, but also they act as a team that will ingest data from an upstream team. So there's this data flow that goes from one team to the other and that requires us to not only digitize the data that they produce, but also automate the way that they look at the data that they need to ingest. So we needed to find a way to digitize and automate the data across different teams to be able to create one cohesive agile plan, to be able to produce a view for the organization going forward.
Speaker 1:
Yeah, that is super impressive information. And talk about your team who put this together from concept to pilot. What was that process like, how long did it take? And I guess it's an ongoing, evolving kind of program.
Speaker 2:
Yes, it was an interesting journey. I mean, it started at almost 12 months ago, back in winter of 2023. And the idea was to bring all the teams together and whiteboard what the system of record would look like. What do we actually want to do, what's the problem we're trying to solve and how we can actually create it with Appian. We knew it will be challenging because each team would have a specific requirement that is different, so we had to customize the views, the solution, the modules for each team separately, so we can't build one system that fits everyone all at once, and we really leveraged something called Sites in Appium. So Sites is essentially a way for you to customize, for each profile, the UI for that team, with the information that they require and with the interaction in the UX that they require, and that was pretty powerful.
Speaker 2:
That allows us to create almost six or seven different applications into one we use the same data fabric, we use the same backend, but each team would have a separate profile that really cater for their own needs.
Speaker 2:
So building that blueprint of application is what we started with, and I was extremely particular about the UI itself.
Speaker 2:
I wanted it to be seamless, I wanted it to be beautiful, I wanted it to be elegant, because these teams would spend six, seven hours a day using that application and, at the same time, we didn't want to use swivel shares.
Speaker 2:
I didn't want them to go to a different system to pull data or go, and then you and then ask for another team for a set of data. And I was also particular about what we did not want to do. So I didn't want to allow them to pull data and dump it into an Excel sheet, do their analysis and upload it back again, because that would break the whole workflow. So that took time, because then, if you're not allowing them to do that, you need to understand the user story, you need to understand exactly what they need and you need to create it into the system itself. So the system itself has to be agile, has to be comprehensive to allow them to do all the work that they need to do without allowing them to break it by externally looking at different applications or tools to be able to create the information entity that they want, if you will.
Speaker 1:
That's phenomenal. So there must be a lot of benefits. I think you even talk about some of the tangible benefits cost savings resulting from the project. You also talk, I think, about the intangibles going to work and having a workday that's not overwhelming. Talk about some of the results you've seen Absolutely.
Speaker 2:
The first quantifiable benefit is reducing the cycle of planning. I love the analogy that we usually use it's about the Jenga tower, so it's very difficult to put all these planning blocks together, and build something comprehensive as your integrated plan, and it takes a long time to do that.
Speaker 2:
So the first achievement was to be able to reduce the cycle it takes for a comprehensive plan to be created. So instead of using six to eight months to create one plan, we're able to create that full plan in less than three months. But then iterating from one plan to the other is also something that we're able to address effectively and seamlessly. The problem in the past is because all these systems were fragmented and all the data was in different sources.
Speaker 2:
Once you change something in the plant, you have to start from scratch. Your whole Jenga tower will fall apart and you have to rebuild it from scratch again because the strategy of the organization has changed, or you need to address a change that is required by one organization has changed, or you need to address a change that is required by one organization. So in order to address that, we're able to create relationship between the different teams and the records they create. So once you adjust or modify a record, you're able to understand the limited impact that record has and then limit the change to that and be able to iterate from one plan to the other without having to redo it all. That's phenomenal and that changed the mindset around planning and mindset about change itself.
Speaker 2:
Because in the past, when you start addressing change, people would feel frustrated. You know like, why are we changing the plan again? This team doesn't know what they're doing and I have to address their change of heart or change of mind. But now that the system allows us to do that seamlessly, we understand that change is required and we understand that this is a better plan that we're going to create. So people addressing change differently it's not something that they have to react to or resist. It's something that they understand has value for the organization and that allows us to change and be more agile in a very faster way.
Speaker 1:
Wow, that's fantastic. So you must have seen a lot here this week at Appian World enhancements and roadmap and futures. You must have lots of ideas. What are you thinking about? What's next? Short-term, long-term?
Speaker 2:
I'm very excited about AI and what layers of AI can bring to the system, but AI is vast and it's a generic word now and can address many different aspects of systems or tools. I want to be specific about where I see AI would create value for our system and for my organization. There are two areas that I see we can create value through AI. The first one is self-serve analytics. Once we create planning, you have to create a lot of reports for the executive team to understand the impact, the return on investment, the required capital, the value for the organization or for the business. So being able to use AI to do self-serve analytics for the executive is a very powerful tool.
Speaker 2:
I don't have to customize or create standard reports. Or create standard reports, I can allow the executive to go in and use prompts to ask questions about the plan and the return on investment and the value that it creates. But there's also a piece where you can use AI for decision-making. Think about we do change because we want to do scenarios as well, whether it's war, gaming or whether it's understanding which scenario would be better overall for TELUS in terms of success. So can we use AI to run these scenarios automatically? Can we actually, instead of running three or four scenarios in a given month, can we run 100 or 1,000 and see which one is best and provide the best results?
Speaker 2:
But I don't think we're there yet. So I'm really excited about the opportunity and the potential that could bring. I don't think we're there yet, so I'm really excited about the opportunity and the potential that could bring. But that requires a lot of testing with the Appian team and trying to see if these use cases would provide the success they expected to provide. And we're not afraid to test the waters and even if it doesn't succeed, we're going to try again and iterate from there. So I'm very excited about what that could bring and I'm looking forward to partner with Appian to test these type of use cases with them.
Speaker 1:
Yeah, it's going to be exciting to see. So. I work with a lot of US telecom service providers who have long histories so they've built up lots of technical debt and lots of legacy systems. Any advice to them or others around the world for getting started on this sort of low-code?
Speaker 2:
journey. I think low-code in general allows the business to own the process. So in the past you would have to go to your IT department, your IT group, and ask them to develop an idea of yours. This is the application I want, this is the system I want. Can you help me develop it? Can you help me create it? And that takes a lot of time and sometimes, because the IT have different specific guidance or requirements, they're not really providing applications that are fitting to the business needs. But with low-code, business is taking ownership of that whole process. The development is not the difficult part. The development is the easy part. The difficult part is articulating the requirements and then be able to address the idea or the challenge in an effective way. So for me, bringing the ownership to the business team who understand the challenge, who has the innovation and creativity to build those systems, is the biggest win of low-code.
Speaker 2:
But the other thing is integration. Like when we first created the first system and it was successful, people want more of that. So they want to replace every single legacy system they have in the organization with a new system that we can create on Appian. And you can't do that, not just because it's expensive, but it's difficult to scale all of that all at once. So we use integration, we use APIs. Leave the system of records as they are, leave the legacy systems there. They might not evolve fast, but they are there and they do a role. But connect to them. Avoid swivel share Almost. Bring pull code as your interface that allows you to tap into that data. Bring it to data fabric, do all the interesting, sexy stuff with it, and then you can put it back in terms of archiving into the legacy systems that you have. So use integration as a scale factor, as a way to be able to expand and scale in the organization without necessarily having to replace every single legacy system that you own.
Speaker 1:
Well, fantastic advice. Congratulations on all the success, and you have a long trip back, so good luck with that. And yeah, somewhere in Vancouver, that's the place to be, absolutely.
Speaker 2:
Next time you're in Vancouver, please let me know and maybe we can meet and have coffee. All right, thanks so much.