Catalyst Project

Ecosystems: From opportunity to capability – A playbook approach for CSPs

C20.0.23
This Catalyst project is developing a useful set of tools for communication service providers (CSP) professionals in the areas of enterprise architecture, strategy, business modelling and product management. It aligns with the digital industry in its adoption of the methodologies used to evaluate opportunities and provides a pragmatic way of bringing together TM Forum assets into action plans that can be adopted by CSPs of all sizes.

The project has been prompted by the fundamental shifts that are happening in the telecom industry, just as they are in other business verticals around the world, where the lines are starting to blur within and between industries, as media, telecoms, ecommerce and IoT overlap across dozens of verticals.

This amalgamation of verticals is giving birth to complex ecosystems that govern the rules of engagement between participants, rather than the siloed classifications that applied in the past. Today, it is our business to become familiar with adjacent industries and technologies to discover where the opportunities of the future may lie.

In this context, this Catalyst project sets out to guide CSP professionals on how to visualize an ecosystem at a high level; to study its players and their interdependencies, but without becoming buried in so much detail that the big picture is obscured.

The project solution starts by identifying the ecosystem participants; their roles are key to understanding how the ecosystem currently works and how value is created. However, it layers this picture with constraints that expose the rationales governing the current status quo. More often than not, this gives rise to opportunities that can be visualized for CSP participation in the ecosystem.

Once the opportunity has been isolated, the project solution frames it in terms of its potential, its impact on stakeholders and the intrinsic value it can create for them. It then models it out to come up with the key value being generated. This allows identification of value streams; a multi-stage value exchange that happens to support a predicted outcome and which unlocks the opportunity that has been identified.

The final step is to help map capabilities and identify the various portfolio combinations that can be considered by CSPs as an approach to prioritising their enterprise architecture decisions.

Ultimately, the aim is to demonstrate how CSPs can start evaluating new business ideas, regardless of whether they are situated within their existing domain or whether they are elements related to an adjacent industry. The rapid analysis that is hopefully enabled by the Play Book should reduce the excessive time that can often cause ideas to die before a sufficiently rigourous inspection of them can be undertaken.

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Read the Playbook:

Ecosystems – From Opportunity to Capability. A Playbook for CSPs