TMF Keeps Up With the Changing Telecom Industry

In the almost 20 years since the TeleManagement Forum was founded, one could say the telecom industry has taken an evolutionary leap that’s the equivalent of going from Neanderthals to modern-day humans in the span of just a couple of decades.

In the late 1980s, very few people had cell phones, and the ones who did had to haul around clunky handsets. On the fixed-line front, you could purchase voice service from your operator and primitive bandwidth services, but there was little else going on.

We’ve gone from monopolies to a competitive marketplace in telecom. We’ve moved from fixed-line to mobile, which includes such a strong convergence of the two that, at times, you can’t tell the difference between them anymore. We’ve made the change from circuit-switched networks to an IP-centric network approach. And fueled by these changes, we’ve seen an explosion of new services that most service providers will tell you is just the tip of the iceberg!

And even the nature of service providers has changed beyond recognition with more and more not even owning their own network. Names like Disney, Skype and Google are being spoken of as service providers and serious competitors to the traditional players. In fact, ringtones – a wildly popular mobile service – haven’t even been dominated by the major operators, but rather by industry portals, none of whom own a network or even a customer. They simply are using the operator as a way to get to the customer.

So in an industry that is in a constant state of flux, where does the TeleManagement Forum (TMF) come in and how do we remain a relevant force for the traditional Tier 1 operators, the competitive providers, the upstart players, the telecom hardware and software vendors and everyone in between?

Back Office: The Key to Success
The TMF point of view is that the only way to survive in this rapidly changing service-centric world is through excellence in the back office. In the past few years, service providers have really grown in terms of understanding that the back office is actually a competitive tool, not a necessary evil. The providers with the most competitive and flexible back office are the ones that most effectively will compete in this marketplace where nobody knows what’s coming down the line.

No one knows what the next “killer” service will be – no one predicted SMS would be the killer service for mobile. So the only way to increase your chances of hitting on the killer service is to deploy thousands of services at any given time and see which ones work. And once you have a hit, you need to be able to ramp it up quickly to take advantage of the market. Conversely, for the 99 percent of services that don’t make it, the service provider must be able to turn them off instantly and at low cost. And the only way a service provider can deploy thousands of services at a time is if they have an incredibly flexible back office. Without this, it’s going to cost the service provider a disproportionately large amount to get each service out the door.

Providing the Right Tools for Service Providers
The TMF aims to provide the standards, tools and frameworks that allow service providers and vendors to thrive in this challenging marketplace. At any given time, the TMF has 20 or 30 working teams addressing a wide range of telecom management problems – problems that range from the management of VoIP services or WiMAX, to the challenge presented by revenue leakage in all service providers. Each of these teams will have anything from 10 to 100 different companies contributing resources to help define a common solution that all can agree on.

And underpinning all of this work is the NGOSS framework. This has been defined over the past five years to act as the framework within which all OSS/BSS problems are addressed to ensure that all of the various standards from the 20 or 30 teams are compatible with each other. The core elements of the NGOSS framework include the eTOM (enhanced Telecoms Operations Map) Business Process Framework, which defines a common set of business processes for all service providers. This allows providers to move to a process-centric view of the world and drive their OSS/BSS systems decisions based on how it enables them to implement better processes. Another key element of NGOSS is the SID (Shared Information & Data Model), which provides a comprehensive common information model for the complete telecom activities of a service provider. It allows them to describe all of their information so they have good, consistent data to share among their various systems.

In addition to all the technical work, the TMF Collaboration program also is involved in developing business-centric programs such as the Telecom Industry Benchmarking program, which is benchmarking the business practices of a number of our service provider members against a wide range of business and operations metrics.

So, while telecom may be changing constantly and on the move, the TMF is adapting to provide the best services possible to all players.

In future columns, I’ll delve even deeper into some of the key issues of the day, such as integrated customer management, service delivery platforms and telecom media convergence, so stay tuned!

Martin Creaner is CTO of TeleManagement Forum. He can be reached at mcreaner@tmforum.org .

TeleManagement Forum www.tmforum.org

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