Management World: TM Forum opens up standards processes to more voices

ORLANDO – The TM Forum is working to open up its standards- and framework-building processes to more voices, including mapping a key telecom business process standard to similar work being done in the IT world.

In the most formal demonstration of this direction, the forum this week announced version 8 of its eTOM business process framework, which provides a common vocabulary and framework defining crucial service provider business processes.

The new version has much stronger billing and revenue management components, thanks to work contributed by the Global Billing Association. Perhaps more notably, it also reflects an alignment of eTom with the ITIL (IT Infrastructure Library), a set of best practice processes for delivering services within the IT industry.

While the alignment between eTOM and ITIL might seem fairly esoteric, many service providers and vendors make use of both sets of guidelines, said Mike Kelly, the TM Forum’s subject matter expert on the eTom framework. The two groups identified 14 different areas of overlap and built links in the eTOM document to the corresponding ITIL best practices, Kelly said.

More broadly, the forum also announced plans to create a new, more collaborative environment for more industry players to contribute to its standards efforts. To that end , it is deploying a more open code management platform and repository as well as a new social networking/wiki environment to provide members with a greater voice in its work processes. The main goal is to bring in more feedback on forum standards and specifications from real-world implementations.

“We’re changing the water line in terms of how we run collaborative programs,” said Keith Willetts, TM Forum Chairman. “The question is: How do we bridge the gap between the few hundred people who are deeply involved in the creation of some of our standards and the tens of thousands of people who use them? We want to open up a lot of our technical work.”