Ericsson shows how to harness OneOffice foundations to build your Horizon 3 future

Swedish multinational ICT giant Ericsson is showing how to build on HFS One Office™ foundations in Exhibit 1 to take the leap to the HFS OneEcosystem™ future as a Horizon 3 organization.

We tracked the hard yards Ericsson did to digitally transform in line with the HFS OneOffice in this 2018 HFS case study. Five years on, with OneOffice foundations firmly in place, HFS returned to learn how Ericsson’s Enterprise Automation & AI Group is moving quickly toward its next horizon.

In 2018, we found Ericsson well on its way to achieving the OneOffice, the approach encapsulated in Horizon 2 of the three HFS Horizons. In the OneOffice, front, middle, and back offices align to drive customer and employee experience. As illustrated by our logo placement in Exhibit 1, Ericsson has almost completed its journey to Horizon 3.

Digital transformation delivered at the enterprise level

Ericsson is building on Horizon 1 cost efficiencies and Horizon 2 excellence in data-driven operations and customer and employee experience. Its Enterprise AI Engine offers a custom solution for identifying, building, operating, and orchestrating automation and AI solutions, enabling enterprise scalability by modularization and reuse of knowledge and software assets to improve Ericsson’s business performance.

To deliver, it has proved strong on all the organizational characteristics of Horizon 2 shown in Exhibit 1 and adopted all its emerging technologies at scale

Exhibit 1: Ericsson’s near-complete journey to Horizon 3 builds on solid ground; when quantum and autonomous processes are adopted at scale, the journey will be complete

Source: HFS Research, 2023

A Horizon 2 foundation has paved the way for a OneEcosystem approach

Ericsson’s Enterprise Automation & AI Group is becoming a Horizon 3 organization, developing innovation with a network of partners in a OneEcosystem approach. Here, the value aspiration is in synergies: identifying and developing new sources of value with partners sharing your purpose and ambitions. The OneEcosystem organization connects customer, employee, and partner experiences to create new value thresholds. None of this is possible without the foundations of OneOffice.

At the heart of Ericsson’s success is its adoption of automation, AI, and blockchain at the enterprise scale. Vice President and Head of Enterprise Automation & AI, Rickard Wieselfors, says the intention at every turn has been not just to adopt but to create exponential business impact at scale.

Make impact, customer-centricity, and democratization your principles for scale

To deliver scale, Rickard’s team follows four ambitious guiding principles:

• Exponential impact: Take on complex challenges and identify new opportunities that can be tackled by leveraging “exponential technologies.” For Ericsson, these include machine learning, blockchain, low code, robotic process automation, and natural language processing in combination with an AI-led transformation approach to disrupt the entire operating model.
• Customer centricity: Focus on impactful and critical business results working with key stakeholders in all business and market areas across the organization in order to ensure correct prioritization of use cases and customer need.
• Scale: Make solutions for end-to-end business processes and enable use and adoption across the organization. This is enabled by the ability to industrialize automation and AI, allowing delivery and operations of the products and services to be scaled at speed with a focus on sustained value throughout the lifecycle.
• Automation movement: Democratize access to automation and data science to enable the whole enterprise to identify and realize opportunities to improve productivity, efficiency, and user/customer experience.

The strategy has focused on continuous innovation; composability, offering modular, standardized, and reusable automation and AI products and services; democratization, enabling a citizen-led “discover-implement-operate” model and making automation and AI products accessible to all.

Exponential technologies deliver exponential outcomes

By enabling an AI-powered customer product portfolio and experiences, Ericsson’s Enterprise Automation & AI Group has seen exponential improvements in business outcomes and customer experiences, with 10x improvement as the minimum benchmark and up to 1,000x in some cases.

It has delivered more than 500 automation solutions, including these interesting highlights. It

• freed more than 2.5 million hours (approximately 1,500 full-time equivalents) in manual tasks from employees, allowing them to focus on higher-value-generating work;
• provided 95% time-savings in finance thanks to re-thinking the workflow with a machine-first mindset, reducing manual steps to a minimum;
• used 24% less energy in a 5G-enabled smart factory;
• reduced quote-to-cash by 90 days; and
• enabled more than $50 million value from 30 industrialized AI/ML solutions transforming key processes.

Exhibit 2: Ericsson believes any organization could leverage its approach to accelerate AI-led transformation.

Source: Ericsson, 2022

Ericsson reaches toward Horizon 3

Ericsson is now entering Horizon 3, evidenced in Exhibits 3 and 4, and by the technology partnerships it has formed to build and enable its solutions, its decentralized approach to its composable architecture (see Enterprise AI Engine in Exhibit 2), and partnering skills shown by its advisory and transformation efforts. HFS has always identified the need to practice and refine how you partner internally in preparation for the external partnerships required of the OneEcosystem approach of Horizon 3.

Exhibit 3: What Ericsson’s Automation & AI group is doing to become an HFS’s Horizon 3 organization.

Source: HFS Research, 2023

Exhibit 4: How Ericsson is adopting HFS Horizon 3 technologies.

Source: HFS Research, 2023

Ericsson has shown how to successfully collaborate internally, using business and IT/AI fusion teams with common objectives related to improving business outcomes to develop, implement, and scale automation and AI solutions. It has also been successful in collaborating with external technology partners to create innovative solutions by utilizing partner platforms, applying available, best-in-class products and services in the market to unlock value for the company, and to co-create solutions with partners for the benefit of both parties. The intention is to scale automation and AI across the entire enterprise, using a mix of internally created and externally sourced products, services, and components.

Ericsson has established trusted relationships with multiple key technology partners in each technology area, such as machine learning/AI, low code, blockchain, RPA, natural language processing, and cognitive automation. Ericsson turns to large IT service providers and Combient for resource augmentation.

Dedicated team focuses on scaling the innovation ecosystem

Ericsson has set up a dedicated innovation team tasked with identifying, testing, and onboarding new technologies in the marketplace and further developing its external ecosystem of partners, as the technology and partner landscape is changing faster than ever. These are important steps toward placing partner experience alongside customer and employee experience in your value aspirations and enjoying the synergistic benefits of Horizon 3.

The key capabilities of the team are:

• a mix between senior innovation managers with extensive experience and junior innovation project leaders with IT, Computer Science and Machine Learning backgrounds
• Great networks across Ericsson, allowing easy and informal access to top talent and key decision makers
• Product development
• R&D
• Lean Agile methodologies
• Project Management
• Data Science, Machine Learning, Analytics
• Curious mindset
• Knowledge about Ericsson’s business

The fruits of the Ericsson approach to automation and AI are also being shared with their ecosystem of partners. For example, when it developed its Rapid Indoor Calculator to identify 5G needs, it made the outcome available to its sales teams and partners through an internal marketplace.

The Bottom Line: You need firm OneOffice foundations if you harbor Horizon 3 ambitions.

Ericsson’s Enterprise Automation & AI Group has demonstrated that using HFS OneOffice as your rudder delivers experience outcomes. In doing so, it has laid strong foundations for building its future as a Horizon 3 business. It has learned the art of partnering internally first—ideal preparation for the emerging need to focus on partner experience demanded of serious ecosystem builders.

We look forward to seeing Ericsson grow its innovation team as it scales its HFS OneEcosystem ambitions in search of new sources of value.