The first step in transformation was building a unified data layer across all of those sources. Lumen ingested nearly 500 data sources into a common platform and built data objects that link network elements, customer services, cost data and revenue data across what were previously hard organizational and system boundaries.
“This is the first time we’ve been able to relate those things to one another,” Corcoran said.
The outcome is what Corcoran describes as a digital twin that goes well beyond the network layer. “It’s a digital twin of our inventory, of our architecture, of our ecosystem,” she said.
A representative use case is identifying all customers in a given metro that are running legacy voice services, determining the next best migration offer based on current network capacity and feature parity, and surfacing the path with the least customer disruption. That analysis previously required multiple teams working over weeks or months.
That unified data model is also what makes automation possible at the execution layer, where engineers are doing the actual decommission work.
Turning data into execution
The tool Lumen’s field engineers use to execute decommissions is called NetPal, a proprietary workflow tool built on top of its data platform.
