More than 230 Member Companies from around the Globe Worked on 14 Agile Projects to Collectively Shape, Manage and Monetize Digital Business
TM FORUM LIVE! DIGITAL DISRUPTION, SAN JOSE, CALIF. — Dec. 10, 2014: As TM Forum Live! Digital Disruption continues, exploring everything from disruptive technology and Internet of Things (IoT) to digital business transformation, customer centricity and the impact of NFV, TM Forum today announces the latest version of its Frameworx suite of best practices,Frameworx 14.5. The update delivers a host of new tools to help businesses accelerate their transformation and thrive in the digital ecosystem. The Forum’s diverse global membership, which includes more than 90% of the world’s largest service providers, can now download and make use of the tools, best practices, standards, APIs and interfaces found in this new release.
Adopted by 91% of the world’s largest service providers, Frameworx continues to be the most widely used blueprint for effective and efficient business operations. In fact, 82% of service providers in TM Forum’s 2014 Frameworx adoption survey now mandate Frameworx in many or all RFPs, and 85% claim that Frameworx conformance has an important influence on their solution and product buying decisions. More than 80 products, solutions and implementations from 30+ companies – including service providers, such as Verizon and Telkom Indonesia, and technology suppliers, such as Ericsson and Oracle – have recently been certified as conformant to Frameworx through TM Forum’s Conformance Certification program.
“Frameworx 14.5 delivers essential new tools, best practices and guides to help our members accelerate their R&D, while reducing the cost and risk, and showcases how TM Forum is successfully fostering innovation by solving the common challenges that slow our industry down,” said Nik Willetts, chief digital officer, TM Forum. “From the new NFV Extra Insights reports and omni-channel customer centricity guidebooks, to our first Digital Services Toolkit and dozens of additional features, this is a truly special release, and a testament to our members’ commitment to creating an open digital ecosystem that is safe, reliable and sustainable.”
Highlights of Frameworx 14.5
In just four months, hundreds of individuals from over 230 member companies have used TM Forum’s proven agile collaboration and development machine in 14 projects to deliver the new features in Frameworx 14.5, guided by the Forum’s Agile Business and IT, Open Digital Ecosystem, and Customer Centricity Strategic Programs.
TM Forum’s Agile Business and IT Program helps service providers and enterprises to get fit for the digital world and continuously optimize their IT and business operations. Key features in Frameworx 14.5 that support this program are:
- A set of new Extra Insights eBooks based on the Forum’s Zero-touch Operations, Orchestration and Management (ZOOM) project, including Extra Insights – NFV: Are you prepared? Operations and procurement readiness, which identifies the key technical, business, organizational and cultural changes necessary for service providers to successfully procure and deploy virtualized network components.
- Extra Insights – NFV: What does it take to be agile? DevOps transformation framework for the digital ecosystem explores how to transform from a traditional SysOps/NetOps approach to an agile DevOps approach in order to quickly introduce new services.
- Extra Insights – NFV: Can it be managed? Blueprint for end-to-end management defines the essential requirements for effective digital service management that spans multiple partners’ environments, specifically exploring how to deploy end-to-end management in a hybrid world with both current and virtualized components.
- A comprehensive set of technical reports on a wide range of topics, including a compendium of NFV user stories, NFV MANO gap analysis, specifications and interface requirements, exploratory reports on NFV security fabric needs, NFV readiness, impact of end-to-end SLA management, OSS/BSS futures and many more.
TM Forum’s Open Digital Ecosystem Program helps service providers, enterprises and technology suppliers create, build and operate complex, innovative services by establishing the right tools, APIs, standards and best practices. Key features in Frameworx 14.5 that support this program are:
- TM Forum has collaborated with more than two dozen enterprises as an agile team to assemble the first version of the Digital Services Toolkit, which includes the Digital Services Reference Architecture (DSRA), B2B2X partnering initiative, REST-based management APIs and end-to-end use cases, among numerous other components.
- An introduction to the DSRA, the Forum’s proposal to enable richer and more open, distributed digital collaboration with the essential tools to support increasingly demanding technical and commercial models.
- An extension of the B2B2X Partnering guide, providing the basis for best practices for the identification of touch points between partners in the digital ecosystem.
- Best practices for specifying REST-based Management APIs and understanding common patterns across Open Digital Ecosystem APIs. This release also includes additional Open Digital APIs for customer management, party management, SLA management and more.
- Applied Frameworx for Smart Energy provides utilities with examples of using Frameworx best practices, blueprints, models, APIs and integration to create a scalable set of digital services to address priority use cases.
- Additionally, Applied Frameworx for IoT will be available shortly, providing business canvas templates that support vertical industry user stories.
TM Forum’s Customer Centricity Program recognizes that keeping the customer front and center is critical for the success of a digital business. Customer experience, data analytics, metrics and revenue management are all impacted by upcoming additions of M2M services/connected everything and virtualized networks and services. Key features in Frameworx 14.5 to address these issues are:
- The new Omni-channel Guidebook introduces the key imperatives for omni-channel implementation, a definition of the operational functions needed, and more than thirty requirements and mini use cases for evaluating omni-channel project priorities.
- Updates to the Customer Experience Guidebook as well as a new user case template and further use cases.
- Enhancements to the Data Analytics Reference Model, new big data analytics use cases and important privacy risk scoring for user cases are all aimed at helping service providers unleash the power of big data.
- Sixty-one new customer experience management metrics, as well as many new dimensions, increasing the depth of coverage of retail outlets, account activation, payment and IVR performance. There are also many corrections and consistency improvements, bringing the total number of customer experience management metrics to 537.
- A new How-to Guide, Becoming a Customer-Centric Business.
While the importance of being customer-centric is increasingly understood by businesses across the spectrum and around the world, there’s an acute shortage of insight into what to do about it and how to do it. This guide sets out to do just that.
Significant updates were also made to the core frameworks, including:
- Phase II of the Functional Model of the Application Framework (TAM) was completed adding substantially to the number of functions available. The process of developing a set normalized functional decomposition, captured in the Functional Model, significantly increases value to service providers.
- Updates to the Information Framework (SID) include a new set of test ABEs in the Common, Product, Service, and Resource domains; the final iteration of the Metric model; new updates to the SID Validator; and further alignment of the guide books and models.
- Enhancements to the Data Analytics Reference Model, new big data analytics use cases and important privacy risk scoring for user cases are all aimed at helping service providers unleash the power of big data.
- Domains have been added to the Business Process Framework (eTOM) to increase its alignment with the other frameworks and making it easier for members to see the cross framework associations. New decomposition rules were added as well, increasing the consistency of the framework and Fraud processes where added in concert with the Fraud Management Project to expand the areas covered by the Business Process Framework.
As proof points of the success of Frameworx, TM Forum’s new Case Study Handbook – available in print at Digital Disruption and online on the Forum’s Inform news channel – features nine service provider success stories highlighting how they harnessed the potential of Frameworx to rise to the challenges of the digital economy. Additionally, at Digital Disruption, dozens of Forum members will be showcasing Frameworx 14.5 enhancements via the popular Catalyst Program, which demonstrates innovative approaches, proof of concept projects and technical solutions to common industry challenges. Follow all of the Digital Disruption action in real-time on Inform and on Twitter at hashtag #LIVEDD14.
About TM Forum
TM Forum is a global industry association which helps its members transform and succeed in the digital economy. The collective experience and interests of our member community comprised of more than 85,000 experts from 900+ global enterprises, service providers and technology suppliers drives everything we do, from thought-provoking research and publications, to practical guidance, tools and best practices, hands-on events, and training for business and IT leaders.
Through three key programs – Agile Business and IT, Open Digital Ecosystem, and Customer Engagement – we provide a unique platform for our members to connect and collaborate with individuals and groups from around the world to solve key challenges and rapidly innovate to deliver new services, improve business agility, partner for success, reduce cost and risk, and enhance customer value and loyalty. To learn more about the Forum and join our digital journey as a valued member and collaborator, please visit www.tmforum.org.
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