How Beijing Mobile Achieved Leading SRE Maturity: Insights from the 2023 GOPS Conference

With rapid digital technology updates, the importance of information systems has become evident, and system stability faces new challenges. The Chinese government’s Key Information Infrastructure Security Protection Regulation (effective from September 1, 2021) requires operators to ensure the safe and stable operation of critical infrastructure. System Reliability and Continuity Engineering (SRE) is increasingly recognized and adopted as a modern operations model.

On October 26, 2023, the 21st GOPS Global Operations Conference was held in Shanghai, jointly organized by the Efficient Operations Community and the DevOps Era Community. At the conference, the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology (CAICT) announced the latest evaluation results of the DevOps series standards.

Beijing Mobile (China Mobile Communications Group Beijing Co., Ltd.) participated in the evaluation with its “Order Center” project, which passed the CAICT’s System Reliability and Continuity Engineering (SRE) Level‑3 Operational Stability Assessment , demonstrating a leading domestic capability.

Interview with Tang Xianli, General Manager of the Information Systems Department, Beijing Mobile

Q: Please introduce yourself, your company, and the project you evaluated.

Tang Xianli explained that Beijing Mobile, founded in 1999, serves millions of individual and enterprise users and supports major national and international events. The company follows a strategy of “digital transformation and high‑quality development” and builds a support architecture based on “autonomous control, agile efficiency, collaborative resonance, and open sharing.”

The Order Center is a core sub‑system of the business support platform, independently deployable and providing standardized order services to personal, enterprise, and IoT customers.

Q: What does achieving a stable and reliable IT system mean for your enterprise?

She highlighted three benefits:

Avoiding customer experience loss, protecting brand image, and fulfilling social responsibility by achieving three‑nine (99.9%) availability targets.

Enabling business growth by providing a stable foundation for diversified services.

Reducing costs and increasing efficiency by freeing operations teams from constant emergency fixes.

Q: Why did you choose to participate in the SRE assessment?

Beijing Mobile aims to support the national “Digital China” strategy and achieve “world‑class information service technology.” The massive scale of its IT assets requires a shift from traditional operations to SRE, which can handle thousands of services with a limited team.

Q: What changes has the SRE assessment brought to your organization?

The assessment helped the team:

Strengthen a growth‑oriented technical culture and eliminate routine operational tasks through tooling.

Promote cross‑functional collaboration and break down departmental silos.

Expand SLO management, improve observability, accelerate incident response, and increase automation, resulting in a 54% reduction in mean time to recovery compared with 2022.

Reduce the number of system failures by 77% year‑over‑year.

Q: What challenges did you encounter during the assessment and how were they addressed?

Key challenges included cultural resistance—traditional teams were highly specialized—and tool complexity due to legacy systems. Beijing Mobile tackled these by reorganizing work modes, investing in core resources, and forming expert teams to redesign and integrate tools.

Q: What successful practices can you share for implementing SRE in an enterprise?

Three essential practices were identified:

Shift the team mindset from traditional “operations” to a product‑oriented, tool‑building approach.

Adopt agile iterative development for SRE tools instead of waterfall projects.

Use SLOs and observability as the primary transformation levers.

Q: What are your future plans for SRE?

Beijing Mobile will standardize its growing portfolio of SRE tools (monitoring, SLO, APM, automation, change management, chaos engineering, etc.) by 2024, and expand SRE practices beyond the operations department to foster organization‑wide cultural change.

Q: How do you see the future of SRE?

She believes SRE is the best practice for large‑scale IT production systems across industries such as telecom, finance, energy, and government, and will continue to drive digital transformation, cost reduction, and efficiency improvements.

Images illustrating the assessment, SLO operation, change management, chaos engineering, performance capacity, observability, and emergency protection are included below.