Management World: TM Forum drives standards, procurement progress

Orlando – The TM Forum’s drive to help service providers help themselves to leverage their back-office to drive new revenues and opportunities spawned two bits of news this week: word that more than 90 service providers have adopted the forum’s Frameworx standards and the creation of a new group to help operators improve their procurement processes.

Frameworx sits at the center of much of the TM Forum’s work these days, offering an over-arching framework, underlying standards and a set of best practices to standardize and automate key BSS and OSS processes. The forum surveyed 90 global service providers on their use of Frameworx standards and found:

• 74 percent of respondents cited Frameworx as an important enabler for reducing the costs and risks associated with integration
• 67 percent already seeing measurable benefits
• 63 percent are already mandating Frameworx conformance in relevant RFx specifications

The Frameworx represents a great balancing effort. Standards and other industry efforts tend to slow not only deployments but realization of benefits from large IT projects. That has led many service providers –and vendors that serve them – to focus on quick-hit opportunities, expedited technology delivery models (like the cloud) and less of a focus on monolithic projects.

At the same time, without support for key standards and practices, back-office efforts in areas like service delivery and customer experience optimization – which require cooperation between multiple vendors and partners – likely will fail.

Shira Levin, who covers next-generation OSS and policy for Infonetics Research, echoes that idea: “Service providers must automate their core business operations using commercial off-the-shelf systems and focus instead on innovative services, partnerships and business models,” she said of the survey. “As a result, we are seeing increased interest in standardized approaches, such as adopting TM Forum’s Frameworx.”

Also at the show, TM Forum launched the newest version Frameworx, Frameworx 11.5, which includes three “quick start” packs targeting processes such as new service rollout, trouble to resolve and TV Everywhere; and more.
Also at the show, TM Forum announced the formation of a new Standards Procurement Council to work on best practices in telecom procurement and supply chain processes. Initial members include include Deutsche Telekom, France Telecom, NetCracker, NSN, NTT, Oracle and Reliance Group.