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

Introduction

In the context of digital transformation, enterprises adopt DevOps to improve IT efficiency. The "R&D Operations Integration (DevOps) Capability Maturity Model" series standards, led by the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology (CAICT), provide strong guidance. Leading enterprises in various industries use the model to assess and improve IT capabilities, integrate team resources and talent, and better support business systems.

Telecom Industry Benchmark Data

Six telecom operators—China Mobile, China Telecom, China Unicom, ZTE, Huawei, and China Tower—have collectively completed 31 DevOps capability assessments.

Overall industry data includes banks, securities, insurance, telecom, and other sectors (details omitted for brevity).

Details of the telecom companies and the number of projects evaluated are shown below.

Project Highlights

Zhejiang Mobile: OSS 4.0 Capability Center

OSS 4.0 capability center focuses on enterprise‑level services and platform capabilities, following the principles of data unification, capability sinking, open standards, and application integration. It supports unified data modeling and computation, enabling rapid, reliable, cost‑effective development. Zhejiang Mobile’s DevOps practice includes a "4321" framework (four layers, three teams, two lines, one integration) and a five‑step transformation process.

Beijing Mobile: E‑commerce System & Central Performance Management System

The e‑commerce system, built on the self‑developed AiDo platform, uses visual metrics, pipeline orchestration, and layered automated testing to improve development efficiency and delivery quality. The central performance management system adopts micro‑service decoupling and container deployment, integrating a data middle‑platform, technology middle‑platform, and business middle‑platform to provide capability services.

Jiangsu Mobile: Aladdin Marketing Enablement Project

Through the DevOps continuous delivery level‑3 assessment, the team improved all seven sub‑domains, shortening demand delivery cycles by 45%, reducing change lead time by 50%, lowering change failure rate below 5%, cutting average build time to about 5 minutes, achieving 100% automated test coverage, and enabling on‑demand release frequency.

China Mobile Software: Public Opinion Project

The project collects online data, performs data cleaning, governance, AI analysis, and delivers intelligence to users.

China Telecom Integration: Biyi Collaborative Development Platform

The platform integrates Jenkins, Nexus, Harbor, SonarQube and other DevOps tools on a micro‑service architecture, providing visual pipeline editing, full monitoring, and a one‑stop lifecycle management based on cloud‑native architecture.

Other Projects (e.g., Jiangsu Telecom Smart Pre‑processing System, China Tower Master Data Management, Fujian Mobile Multi‑Cloud Management Platform, etc.)

These projects demonstrate improvements in data integration, unified interfaces, reduced software heterogeneity, and enhanced security, compliance, and operational efficiency.

About the DevOps Capability Maturity Model

The model, jointly developed by CAICT, the Cloud Computing Open Source Industry Alliance, the Efficient Operations Community, and leading internet and financial companies, is the first comprehensive DevOps standard in China and has been approved by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology. It was also concluded by the ITU‑T in July 2020 as the world’s first international DevOps standard. The model covers agile development management, continuous delivery, technical operations, application design, security and risk management, system and tools, business value management, collaborative development and operations, continuous testing, performance measurement, platform engineering, and system reliability and continuity engineering.