Willetts urges TMF to move beyond OSS technology roots

Long Beach, Calif., TeleManagement Forum Chairman Keith Willetts addressed members at the forum’s TeleManagement World conference this week and pushed for a mindset change that got people thinking about business matters rather than technical.

Willetts acknowledged the progress members have made, particularly in defining the New Generation Operations Systems and Software (NGOSS) and other technology frameworks designed to help operators become lean, but said it’s not enough.

He called for a new framework: a business excellence framework that moves the forum and its mission beyond its OSS technology roots.

"Creating technology frameworks and standards are a major asset and a great starting point, but unless [people] know how to use these tools they are irrelevant," Willetts said.

He said the industry needs "how-to" guides on driving change, presumably from reference implementations. And he suggested that while many operators have made changes, they haven’t really changed the way they do business.

"So putting a new network in without changing the way your business is run is like putting a new V8 engine in a rusty old [chariot,]" Willetts said.

He suggested the approach to change has been backwards. "Business change has to drive process change, which in turn drives systems change--not the other way around," Willetts said.

Some of the change Willetts called for includes the possibility of more open source code, drag-and-drop capabilities for creating new services, customer interaction with all their services directly from a screen, service that can be trailed easily and pulled back without costs taking a hit if they failed and a system that can react instantly to market conditions.

"Specifications are not the end of a process to be published and put on a shelf; they have to be turned into market reality," Willetts said.

At the same time, he reflected on the importance of maintaining a solutions focus that looked at a future that is already here in some cases. "We must be there in time for the networks of tomorrow. And much of the new technology can make current OSS/BSS solutions obsolete," Willetts said.

Kathy Walker, executive vice president of network services for Sprint, talked about her company’s challenges in bringing about corporate change and agreed that it must start with business change.

"We can’t have another layer in the layer cake. We need to do business in a different way," Walker said. "It’s not a [certainty] that 100 years of past performance can help you project for the future."

Walker said that change doesn’t happen overnight and that despite being a couple of years into its own transition, "No one would consider us agile at this point," she said. "Transformation is not a project, it is a journey measured in quarters and years. But it is becoming integrated into our DNA."

The TMF has undergone its own transformation, said Jim Warner, president of the TMF. "We have chosen to eat our own cooking and have become lean ourselves," he said.

He credited that transformation in what he called a State of the Forum Address with resulting in an extremely healthy balance sheet. "The organization has never been healthier or better positioned to lead the industry," Warner said.

The TMF will end the year with approximately 400 members, which would break the record from the year 2000.

Warner said that over the last 12 months, the NGOSS framework has become robust and is nearly complete. Also, the forum’s Catalyst showcase has evolved, he said. "There is a shift in Catalyst projects away from being clever demos of what is possible to real world solutions."