How China’s Telecom Giants Accelerate IT Efficiency with DevOps Maturity Models

In the context of digital transformation, enterprises adopt DevOps to improve IT efficiency. The "R&D Operations Integration (DevOps) Capability Maturity Model" series, led by the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology, provides high‑value guidance. Leading telecom firms have used the model to assess and enhance their IT capabilities, integrate team resources, and better support business systems.

China Unicom, China Mobile, China Telecom, Huawei, China Tower, and ZTE together participated in 18 DevOps capability maturity model assessment projects.

Zhejiang Mobile: OSS 4.0 Capability Centralized Performance Center

OSS 4.0 Capability Centralized Performance Center positions the project as an enterprise‑level service and platform capability, built on the principles of data unification, capability sinking, open integration, and application linkage. It supports unified data modeling and computation, enabling business data analysis, and decouples applications for flexible, rapid development.

The Zhejiang Mobile DevOps research‑operation system follows a "four‑layer three‑team two‑line one‑body" architecture and a five‑step transformation process, continuously optimizing organization, technology, process, and culture.

Beijing Mobile: 2 Projects Assessed

Electronic Commerce System – Built on the self‑developed DevOps R&D‑Operations integration platform AiDo, it provides visual metric control, pipeline orchestration, and layered automated testing, boosting development efficiency and delivery quality for Beijing Mobile’s omnichannel business.

Centralized Performance Management System – Implements microservice decoupling and container deployment. Based on a "thick middle‑platform, thin application" principle, it unifies data foundations, offers shared data collection and analysis, and provides common technology components (GIS, UIUE, AI) through a technology middle‑platform.

Jiangsu Mobile: Aladdin Marketing Enablement Project

Through the DevOps Continuous Delivery Level‑3 assessment, the team achieved significant improvements across seven capability sub‑domains: delivery cycle shortened by 45%, pre‑change time reduced by 50%, change failure rate below 5%, average build time around 5 minutes, automated test coverage reached 100%, and release frequency became on‑demand.

China Mobile Software: China Mobile Sentiment Project

The project collects data from the web, performs data cleaning, governance, AI analysis, and delivers intelligence to users. It integrates data acquisition, processing, and AI‑driven insights within the mobile cloud environment.

China Telecom: Intelligent Preprocessing System

The system serves as a service platform that integrates low‑level network operation capabilities and data, performing unified orchestration and outputting fault segments and diagnostic reports for upper‑layer applications, following DevOps standards throughout.

China Unicom Group Resource Center – One‑Card Recharge Project

The project standardizes the "one‑card recharge" management interface across 31 provinces, consolidates common functions, eliminates duplicate development, reduces software heterogeneity, and, combined with DevOps efficiency management, significantly lowers software management costs while improving development efficiency.

Inner Mongolia Mobile: Government & Enterprise Business Support System (Esop)

The ESOP project provides a unified portal for regional customer managers, integrating multiple business platforms (BBOSS, customer hall, CRM, etc.) under a smart middle‑platform architecture, enabling faster, higher‑quality response to business changes.

Assessment results show a 25% reduction in delivery cycle, 50% reduction in version cycle, 300% improvement in integration efficiency, and automation test coverage up to 95%.

China Tower: Master Data Management Module Project

The module establishes standards and governance for master data across the organization (organizations, personnel, regions, suppliers, customers, materials, etc.), providing 115 interfaces, serving 46 internal systems, and managing about 30 GB of data.

The assessment helped build a complete, traceable, measurable software production process, supporting unified management across multiple R&D centers.

Beijing Mobile CRM Order Center Project

The CRM Order Center, a core business system, provides standardized order services for enterprises, supporting multi‑channel product sales and returns. It runs on a fully cloud‑native architecture (K8s, Mesos+Marathon) with OpenStack virtualization, offering elastic scaling, service governance (rate limiting, circuit breaking, domain isolation), and comprehensive service monitoring.

Zhejiang Mobile: Honey Cloud Energy Efficiency Platform

The platform aligns with Zhejiang Mobile’s internal release control requirements, providing a one‑stop, rapid deployment solution that integrates configuration management, automatic service registration, and cache refresh, tailored to the operator’s system architecture.

China Telecom Integrated Biyi Collaborative R&D Platform

The platform, based on microservice architecture, integrates Jenkins, Nexus, Harbor, SonarQube and other DevOps tools, with deep customizations such as visual pipeline editing and full‑process monitoring, delivering a cloud‑native, end‑to‑end software lifecycle management solution.

DevOps Capability Maturity Model Overview

The series of standards, jointly developed by the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology, the Cloud Computing Open Source Industry Alliance, the Efficient Operations Community, and leading internet companies, is the first comprehensive DevOps standard in China. It has been issued by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology and adopted by many enterprises. In July 2020, the standard was concluded by the United Nations‑affiliated ITU‑T, becoming the world’s first international DevOps standard. The assessment framework includes Agile Development Management, Continuous Delivery, Technical Operations, Application Design, Security & Risk Management, and Systems & Tools.