Friday 29 February 2008

eTOM - Business Process Framework for Telecom



I’ve been craving to write for long on Telecom as I understand it from my experience in the domain over the past (close to) 1 year.

The Telecom Business has two aspects to it:
1: Services – Connecting people and providing High Quality common services to ALL Members of the society at a low cost.
2: Equipment – The Network Elements eg: switches, wires, handsets etc

There has always been a guiding principle to run any Business. That guiding principle is a Business Model / a Framework so here I reproduce information about eTOM that I have come across.

The eTOM:

The NGOSS (Next Generation Operations Systems and Software) Business Process Framework is represented by the Enhanced Telecom Operations Map, also known as (eTOM). The eTOM Business Process Framework is the ongoing TM Forum initiative to deliver a business process model or framework for use by service providers and others within the telecommunications and related sectors of industry.

The eTOM Business Process Framework represents the whole of a service provider’s enterprise environment. The Business Process Framework begins at the Enterprise level and defines business processes in a series of groupings. The Framework is defined as generically as possible so that it is organization, technology and service independent and supports the global community. At the overall conceptual level eTOM can be viewed as having the following three major process areas:
1: Strategy, Infrastructure & Product covering planning and lifecycle management
2: Operations covering the core of operational management
3: Enterprise Management covering corporate or business support management

The process structure in eTOM uses hierarchical decomposition, so that the business processes of the enterprise are successively decomposed in a series of levels. Process descriptions, inputs and outputs, as well as other key elements are defined. The eTOM process modeling depicts process flows in a vertical swim lane approach that drives end-to-end process and process flow-through between the customer and the supporting services, resources and supplier/partners.
The Framework also includes views of functionality as they span horizontally across an enterprise’s internal organizations. For example, managing customer relationships spans an enterprise from marketing to ordering to billing to after-service support and follow-on sales.
In particular, eTOM provides the Business Map for NGOSS and is a prime driver for business requirements to feed through from the NGOS Business View to the System View and eventually intothe NGOSS Implementation and Deployment Views. The focus of eTOM is on the business processes used by service providers, the linkages between these processes, the identification of interfaces, and the use of customer, service, resource, supplier/partner and other information by multiple processes.
The eTOM Business Process Framework can be used as a tool for analyzing your organization’s existing processes and for developing new processes. Different processes delivering the same business functionality can be identified, duplication eliminated, gaps revealed, new process design speeded up, and variance reduced. Using eTOM, you can assess the value, cost and performance of individual processes within your organization.
You can facilitate your relationships with suppliers and partners by identifying and categorizing the processes you use in interactions with them. In a similar manner, you can identify the all-important customer relationship processes and evaluate whether they are functioning as required to meet your customers’ expectations.

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