TMF’s Warner Opines on Telecom’s New Look

Service Providers Must Become Quick-Change Artists

The TeleManagement Forum (TMF) will celebrate its 15-year anniversary at its show next month. The nonprofit global organization provides leadership, strategic guidance and practical solutions to improve the management and operation of information and communications services. Its open membership of more than 340 companies consists of incumbent and newer service providers, computing and network equipment suppliers, software firms and customers of communications services. xchange Editor in Chief Paula Bernier recently spoke with TMF President Jim Warner about the organization; the evolution of support systems; and why telecom is starting to look more like the fashion industry.

X: TMF turns 15 this year. Is the forum doing anything special to mark the anniversary?

Warner: We’re going to be doing some things on our Web site and we’ll be putting out announcements highlighting what we’ve done, especially during our show in November in Dallas.

X: For the uninitiated, explain the focus of TMF.

Warner: We address the complete OSS/BSS space — everything from customer care to service management, fulfillment, assurance and billing.

X: How did TMF get started and how has it changed over the years?

Warner: We were founded as the Network Management Forum and we were actually focused on the end user. In ’90-’91, as more people wanted to buy managed services, it was the service providers that were more interested in what we were doing.

There was really no technical foundation to build upon. So we spent a lot of the first years just talking about the fact that this was a topic people needed to be concerned about. The recent change in the economic climate has made everybody understand this is a mission-critical area.

X: What are the telecom industry’s biggest challenges on the BSS/OSS front going forward?

Warner: Clearly the whole environment has been one that is highly manual. There are still a lot of systems and business processes based on legacy thinking. Telecom is one of the last industries to go through this business transformation that industries like manufacturing, retail and others have gone through. Let’s face it, there are few industries that have the kind of legacy base that telecom has. The challenge is huge. You know the size of some of these customer legacy databases. Even today in telecom it’s rare that you find someone that is responsible for the end-to-end process.

X: xchange’s cover story this month is about customer profitability. How does that issue tie into what you do at TMF?

Warner: This is one of two or three areas we have spent a lot of time on. Provisioning and inventory are two of the subtopics in that area. Inventory is important because you can’t accurately provision services unless you know what you have. If you look at the whole value chain starting with customer self-provisioning, if you don’t have accurate inventory you’ll never be able to do provisioning in zero touch. A lot of this we address through Catalyst proof of concept efforts. We just did something on DSL provisioning based on how BT [British Telecom] does it. There were three service providers and four suppliers in the complete value chain. If any of those participants can’t meet their part, the service cannot be delivered.

X: What is TMF’s Catalyst program about and why did the group start this initiative?

Warner: There have probably been about 75 Catalyst projects to date. It started in ’97. ‘Products not paper’ was the original slogan. That was probably overstated, it should’ve been ‘Products and paper.’ Until then, all industry bodies had been focused on just specs. But we realized the name of the game was what service providers can buy to meet their needs. So through Catalyst, a service provider sponsors a project, saying ‘here’s our problem’ or ‘how can this be done?’. And we see if vendors can put their stuff together in six months to fill the requirements. If the answer is yes, they continue to define it and in the end they make documents available on how they did it. It’ll be focused on a specific problem. Our latest addition is now we’ve added the tail of that — after a Catalyst project has run its course, we have Catalyst-developed products.

X: What is TMF’s biggest success?

Warner: No. 1 is TOM or eTOM, which is the definitive business process model. It lays out how you do business process automation.

X: What are the key issues TMF is focused on today?

Warner: NGOSS, which stands for new generation operations systems and software, is the heart and soul of what we’re doing. eTom is the business process of that. NGOSS is all about interoperability of systems and how systems support business processes. We have a model called the lean operator, which addresses what a business needs to do in the future to be profitable with low margins. Telecom is almost becoming like a fashion goods industry. You don’t have the luxury of rolling out something and having a five-year market test. You just need to put something out there to see if it takes and you need to be able to have systems that scale and support it. And if it doesn’t work you need to be able to turn it off.

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