Internship at
NOKIA
Enabling enterprise to configure consumption-based service offerings
OVERVIEW
In the new 5G world, enterprises will collaborate with the network provider to offer their services. An innovative charging model is needed to help enterprises charge customers based on their consumption. I collaborated with a designer, a content writer and subject matter experts to design and prototype a solution for “Charging as a service” in the B2B2X monetization suite. It is a 7-week project that we worked in a design sprint environment.
Duration:
7 Weeks ( Jan 2020 - March 2020 )
Team:
Olli Mannerkoski ( Project Lead )
Rob Furlano ( Project Lead)
Shashank Jain (Interaction Designer)
Jingyi Cheng (Interaction Designer)
Rachel Patel (Content and Marketing)
My Role:
• Performed primary and secondary research through interviews with SME, online articles, white papers, and press releases.
• Co-led design thinking and Ideation activities.
• Created High Fidelity Prototype and Product Demo through Iteratively refining ideas using feedback and testing at each fidelity stage.
• Co-led visual design and storytelling presentation flow to present the solution
/ Design Process
CHALLENGE
Connectivity Service Providers (Telcos) have been Nokia's traditional customers, and the role of telcos in the new MEC market would in-turn determine the opportunities for Nokia. Therefore, the challenge we started with was:
How might we enable Nokia to help Telcos play a key role within the transformative MEC market?
EXPLORE
/ What is Multi-Access Edge Computing?
Multi-access edge computing (MEC) is a network architecture concept that enables cloud computing capabilities and an IT service environment at the edge of the cellular network and, more in general at the edge of any network. MEC potentially enables a reduction in latency to less than 10ms for digital services.
/ Research and Stake Holder Map
After researching and reading through various papers that talked about potential evolution of MEC ecosystem, news articles, and interviews with Amazon and AT&T, we developed a map that summarises the potential stakeholders that would exist in the MEC market, and what roles or contributions each stakeholder can take.
/ Key Insights
After interviewing with AT&T and Amazon, and through our own research, we generated 6 insights. Since the MEC market is still evolving, some of these are logical derivations we agreed upon though information we got, and the MEC market might or might not play out like this.
A large portion of onboarding, running, and maintaing MEC nodes fall on the Telco Provider, even in cases of partnership with Cloud Service providers like Amazon.
As retail presence is important for effective MEC, there is a potential land grabbing competition between the telcos or Cloud Provider in the future
The whole process of partnering and onboarding MEC nodes is still new, and no fixed and streamlined processes for onboarding, security checks, sale to end consumer etc exist.
There are various businesses and services that are coming up acting as intermediary in MEC ecosystem, making their presence by resolving unclear technical or management issues.
Innovative MEC end use cases would continue to develop depending on industry and end developers, but that would not affect the MEC provider services.
There is a potential market for businesses to become MEC providers to leverage their retail space (Walmart), hardware, ( Dell), or develop some form of partnership with other players.
IDEATE
/ Opportunities
Based on the insights and stakeholder map, we brainstormed as a team to develop value proposition maps, business model canvas, and other tools to come up with potential opportunities for Nokia in the MEC market.
How Might We enable any Telco ease the process of MEC onboarding and collaboration so they become the preferred network for new MEC providers.
Opportunity 4
How Might We enable Telcos to provide consolidated monitoring environment for developers/businesses to monitor and understand their app, MEC, and 5G usage, and monitor end user statistics/experience.
Opportunity 2
How Might We enable Telcos to become MEC aggregators through partnering with multiple MEC providers.
Opportunity 5
How Might We enable Telcos to become consolidated to provide seamless 5G MEC experience to prevent market fragmentation for users?
Opportunity 3
How Might We enable Telcos to sell 5G+MEC plans to their end users? (for small businesses, factories, developers)
/ Storyboarding
We storyboarded the possible scenarios in each opportunity to explore all of them to a certain degree, and enable everyone in the team to have the same understanding and be on the same page.
/ Prioritization
Based on Nokia's strength and existing suite of product, timeline, and impact and size of the market, we prioritized the 5 opportunities. As a team, we decided to take opportunity 1 forward after considering the factors of impact, overlap with other existing Nokia products, new value creation, and timeline.
DECIDE
/ Revised Problem Statement - Who, What, Why?
How Might We enable any Telco ease the process of
MEC Node onboarding for new MEC providers to become preferred MEC connectivity partner.
/ Goals
Providing a Seamless node Onboarding experience to MEC providers
1.
2.
Allowing personalization for different connectivity and services.
/ Scenario
Device.co - Large / Mid-size Enterprise Customer building wearable health devices.
Tim - Device.co lead developer responsible for building out Device.co’s next health monitoring and detection service.
MEC Provider - MEC services provider that is providing both the hardware and software for public.private MEC.
Node - Compute Data centre of the MEC provider (Device.co) that needs to be onboarded on Telco network
Tim has been tasked by his manager to explore setting up a new SaaS service for Device.co’s new medical monitoring service. Tim needs to look into how Device.co's planned nationwide edge nodes could be most efficiently networked to enable the service the company is planning. Device.co is an existing Quadstar customer. Tim decides to test launch 3 nodes in San Francisco area to intially deploy Device.co’s services.
Tim's Goals: Onboard Device.co's 3 MEC datacenters on Telco (Quadstar) network.
/ User Journey
PROTOTYPE
/ Task Flow
/ Prototyping
FINAL DESIGN
MEC Services that meets you where you are.
Explore various MEC options to utilise Quadstars MEC services and leverage any personal resources like hardware or retail space, or buy an end-to endMEC solution.
Search available interconnects near your MEC node based on your requirements of latency & bandwidth.
Onboard your MEC node to the selected interconnect in a seamless process.
Nokia's Digital Operations Suite is used to orchestrate services needed for the connection once the order is committed.
Add Extra services and Customer Support SLA's to personalize your deployment and cater your specific needs.
These services are, but are not limited to, Security, Analytics, Optimization, and IoT. These are powered by existing Nokia's suite of products, and extend Nokia's capabilities like Netgaurd, and IMPACT in MEC deployment.
Review and finalise all Nodes and Services. Make any changes if needed.
Once deployed, monitor your node performances and analytics to improve end user experience.
Leveraging Data from Nokia's range of products, The portal enables Data-driven decision making. It also allows Node Management, addition of new nodes, services, connectivity, and billing management.
VALIDATE
Validation and Feedback stage still in progress. Check back in a week for learnings from this stage & Product Demo Video!
Feel Free to explore other projects :)