Author: Jeevithan Muttu, SVP and GM, Device Management at Motive
For years, IT service management platforms have provided a reliable backbone for enterprise operations. Designed to track incidents, manage workflows, and standardize escalation, they work well in environments where assets are largely static and problems are contained within clear organizational boundaries.
Today’s communications services span networks, devices, home environments, digital applications, identity and authentication layers, and partner ecosystems. Whether a service works at all depends as much on how users are identified and entitled as it does on network performance, making authentication a core component of digital trust rather than a peripheral security check.
This challenge is amplified as authentication and access checks increasingly happen silently in the background, leaving service teams with little visibility into why a service failed from the customer’s perspective.
This is driving a fundamental shift in how service management is viewed inside telecom organizations. What was once a back-office function focused on ticket handling is evolving into an operational intelligence layer that understands the real-time state of services as customers experience them.
Modern service management must do more than manage incidents after the fact; it must:
Artificial intelligence plays an important role here, but only when it is embedded directly into operational workflows. Layering AI on top of analytics dashboards may generate insights, but it does not change outcomes unless those insights are translated into timely, automated action. The real value lies in anticipating problems and acting before they escalate into customer-visible issues.
This architectural shift is closely tied to how customer experience itself has evolved. Experience is no longer defined solely by performance in the core network. It now extends all the way to the edge: the device in the customer’s hand, the home environment, the application they are trying to access, and the interactions that sit between them.
Crucially, many issues that appear to customers as “network problems” are not faults in the traditional sense at all. They are often caused by entitlement mismatches, authentication failures, or configuration and policy issues. These failures frequently leave no obvious network trace, making them difficult to diagnose with conventional tools.
Without visibility into identity and entitlement state, service teams lack the context they need to resolve issues proactively. Complaints become the only signal, and resolution becomes slower, more expensive, and more frustrating for everyone involved.
Across the industry, operators are moving away from SMS-based one-time passwords towards network-anchored authentication models, including silent authentication, SIM-based identity validation, and Open Gateway–style APIs that keep authentication within the operator domain. These technologies are designed to be fit for purpose, improving security, reducing fraud exposure, and supporting regulatory oversight, while also enhancing customer experience.
At the same time, they change how issues surface operationally. Without clear visibility into entitlement and identity state, failures elsewhere in the service chain can appear indistinguishable from service outages: customers cannot connect, applications fail to load, support calls spike, and unnecessary site visits follow, even though the underlying issue is not physical infrastructure.
For service management to function effectively in this environment, it must understand the entitlement state as part of the service context. Without that insight, even well-intentioned automation risks accelerating the wrong response.
These challenges are particularly pronounced for multi-market operator groups, where identity systems and entitlement logic have often evolved independently across operating companies. Fragmentation leads to inconsistent service behavior, duplicated operational effort, and limited visibility at the group level, making proactive service assurance difficult to achieve at scale.
This is the context in which Bayobab, an MTN Group company, has moved to establish a centralized entitlement architecture to support authentication and digital service access across multiple African markets, aligning identity services more closely with network-based trust and control frameworks.
By keeping authentication and entitlement within operator-managed domains, the approach also helps reduce exposure to fraud scenarios that can arise when identity is handled outside the network. Centralizing entitlements provides clearer visibility into service state across markets, helping operational teams distinguish genuine network issues from entitlement-related failures that would otherwise surface as customer complaints.
From a service management perspective, this has practical implications. Greater clarity around the entitlement state reduces the number of false faults escalated to customer care, improves first-call resolution, and helps avoid unnecessary site visits driven by misdiagnosis. At the same time, a unified entitlement layer simplifies the introduction of new digital services and supports emerging models such as silent authentication and API-driven identity, without increasing complexity for individual operating companies.
More broadly, the example shows how entitlementis becoming an integral part of delivering consistent, proactive customer experiences at scale, particularly as digital services and identity-driven access become central to connectivity strategies.
Taken together, these developments point to a broader redefinition of service management’s role. Predictive, context-aware service assurance does more than reduce care costs. It protects revenue by preventing avoidable churn, improves customer trust by resolving issues before they are felt, and underpins new digital services that depend on seamless identity and access.
Operators that modernize their service management architectures are able to resolve fewer issues reactively, engage customers more proactively, and move faster without increasing operational cost. In this model, service management is no longer a cost center to be optimized, but a strategic asset linking network investment, customer experience, and long-term growth.
As operators across Africa continue to scale digital services across diverse markets, these challenges and opportunities become even more pronounced. Complexity is unavoidable. What matters is whether service management evolves to match it.
This is not about replacing ITSM, but about building service management architectures fit for the next phase of connectivity growth. Architectures that span network, device, and identity in real time, and that enable operators to anticipate rather than react.
In an increasingly competitive landscape, the operators that make this shift will be best positioned to deliver experiences that customers feel, not just outcomes that networks measure.