Though there has been some level of personalization in the mobile/wireless space, service providers have not been able to track behavioral-based activity based on historical information held in CRM systems, billing and data repositories. In order to embrace how customers use services and compare that to how they would like to use services, it is necessary to understand the value chain, and the networks and devices that span different providers’ environments.

A key success factor to personalization will be the ability to develop attractive features without extensive customizations. The whole point of getting into digital content is to do something different—to consider that niches of customers who are willing to pay premiums for hard-to-get entertainment. Understanding what is commoditized and what may exist in the Long Tail will help service providers generate more revenue.

The risks associated with introducing new systems into increasingly complex OSS and BSS environments has long been a major inhibitor for Service Providers and suppliers wanting to move towards wide process automation. The new breed of provider needing to deliver a wide range of services quickly and accurately necessitates process automation.

Why TM Forum?

Service providers and all their partners stand to benefit from interfaces, frameworks and guidelines that automate and synchronize customer views across multiple providers’ networks and systems.

Input from the 670 member companies ensures that expansive input, design and thought has gone into each element of TM Forum solutions. As members work together to be consistent across the value chain, they build an environment that enables service providers to more readily see customers existing choices and patterns, and to better understand the direction in which customers want to go.

By using a Business Process Framework (eTOM), service providers start to define a process framework in which they can ‘decompose’ their processes so they can understand them and map them into workflows.

The Applications Framework (TAM) relates the abstract processes revealed in the Process Framework and links them to the applications which can execute them.

TM Forum standards and frameworks are designed to enable providers to evolve their IT environments to enable real data sharing and process automation - replacing information islands with a seamless IT environment that supports the rapid delivery and management of complex, next generation services. TM Forum’s Information Framework (SID) standard is critical for this development.

The TM Forum ensures its standards actually get implemented through its Prosspero initiative, which packages working open-source code, testing frameworks, guidebooks, online developer support, development tools and access to reference implementations.