Back in 2017, an EY telecom survey asked telecommunications CIOs and CTOs what they thought were the biggest opportunities and obstacles facing them in the next three years. Virtualization was already seen as one of the most important enablers of innovation. The two biggest barriers to telco digital transformation initiatives? Legacy IT platforms and architectures, and their workforces’ lack of skills and expertise in digital domains.
In the years since, network operators have increasingly moved to embrace software-centric, cloud-native and disaggregated networks, from the Radio Access Network to the core. They have also invested in hiring and upskilling their existing workforce to gain more of the necessary skills to navigate this network sea-change. But technology can often change faster than organizations.
