Optimizing the Move to Next Generation

Tribold are leading contributors to the ongoing TMF Catalyst program with direct activity in the ground breaking areas of the Content Encounter, SDF, PLM, SID, Master Data Management and Business Activity Monitoring. At TMW Orlando 2009 Tribold presented the Optimizing the Move to Next Generation (OMnG) catalyst.

Background

The promise behind NGN, SDP and IP Multimedia Subsystems (IMS) investments is that they bring flexibility and timeliness with new services to an industry that, in the words of Yankee, has: “between five to 25 new product initiatives each year…but the product development lifecycle… can vary significantly from 3 to more than 12 months.” Bear in mind that this doesn’t include crucial variables, such as multiple feature enhancements or upgrades to portfolios that exceed thousands of different products. In the new world of Generation Me, CSPs will be targeting 10 to 15 new services a month to remain competitive against Web 2.0 companies such as Google, Facebook and others that haven’t even emerged yet.

The global CSP industry has not stood still but responded with an unprecedented capital investment program estimated at more than $16 billion. Much of this investment is scheduled to build next generation networks (NGN) and service delivery platforms (SDP), which will give CSPs greater flexibility, timeliness and, hopefully, increased revenues.

The investments outlined in NGN programs underway, or under consideration across the globe, will make service creation at the network level easier because they offer greater flexibility. Yet flexibility also needs to be built into other areas of the infrastructure to ensure that the benefits offered by next generation networks are fully realized.  Therefore, CSPs need to take a further step and de-couple the access technology silos that exist throughout the legacy IT environment, not just at the network level.  Newly flexible OSS/BSS capabilities can then be built that leverage the existing OSS investment where possible in order to keep the cost of  development and deployment as low as possible.

Problem Statement

Next generation networks will not switch on overnight. Neither will customers be migrated from old to new services in an instant.  The pattern emerging at carriers where transformations are underway indicates operators will have to manage legacy and next generation platforms in parallel for sustained period of time, with resulting challenges in managing customer services across old and new.  This uncertainty over how the transition will be managed has led to delays in undertaking the transition. To optimize this transition to Next Generation platforms this catalysts outlines a reference architecture for CIO’s and COO’s seeking to embark on the transformation journey with more certainty, visibility and control.  Specific benefits outlined include:

• Track progress of the transition against the original business cases for investment
• Adapt market offerings through centralized product management to speed migrations
• Swap services in and out of bundles depending on network & business readiness
• Change process flows as business conditions evolve
• Control customer data migrations based on business-trigger events

The resulting architecture puts the business back in the driver’s seat for the transition to next generation platforms.

Approach

To support these requirements, the catalyst is bringing together key concepts from Product Lifecycle Management (PLM), A Service/Resource Catalog and Business Process Management (BPM) to optimize this transition with key BSS/OSS attributes around Business Insight and Process Flexibility.  Several catalysts, such as the PSA, have explored these areas primarily focused on new services deployment and fulfillment.  This catalyst aims to build on that work and show how transition from a “Legacy” to a “Greenfield” environment over an extended period can be achieved.

Insight into the transition

The main focus of the approach is to provide the business users including CIO, COO and Product Marketing with the insight and flexibility around customer, product and service activity so as to influence the timing and therefore overall cost of the transition.  This insight is provided through real-time BPM monitoring of transition KPI’s such as

• Number of customers on legacy and new platforms
• Number of products on legacy and new platforms
• Number of orders, by products, hitting legacy and new platforms
• Revenue accruing by product, by platform for legacy and next generation

Flexibility to plan and respond to transition timing and costs

As the transition to next generation gets underway the business users need flexibility and control mechanisms to impact on customer and product behavior. The Catalyst reference architecture provides that flexibility through the following tools:

• An service/resource catalog maintaining next generation and legacy services.
  Control over which legacy services are available for product managers to use is under direct control of the technical service team.  As legacy services are switched off they have a cascading affect through the product catalog and the OSS/BSS environment to ensure they are being phased out in a controlled fashion.

• An Enterprise Product Management System (EPM) maintaining the PLM for the commercial offerings and mapping to service definitions.
  The Tribold 3.0 system is integrated directly into the OSS/BSS environment to ensure product changes are reflected into the market in real time
  Product Managers can react to slow product take up through rapid product/service changes and see the market effect reflected back in real-time business monitoring.  Examples may include adding additional features or offering limited time discounts to help speed up the customer-take up and hence the overall transition to next generation.
• A business-analyst-friendly BPM environment where transition flows can be developed and executed
  End-to-end transition flows can be built leveraging library of services and then modified by business analysts as
  Business-level monitoring and dashboards to tie operational performance back to key business case KPIs
  Exception management to gracefully track and repair process fall-out

Results

While the end state for delivering NextGen services can be understood, it is necessary to clearly map out how that end-state will be achieved through appropriate leveraging of legacy assets and customers.  The business case for the alternate approach – e.g., “restarting” the business to deliver these services – is not supportable in today’s environment where most projects must have short payback periods. 

Additionally, the requirements process for legacy to NextGen transition is particularly challenging since it is dependent on currently installed systems, paper based (if you are lucky) process documentation, and impact and are impacted by changes in upstream and downstream systems.  Therefore, a new way of collecting and implementing requirements is required.  The key to this will be a disciplined methodology supported by flexible platforms that can accommodate a variety of process types, integration requirements, and data structures.   The most likely development lifecycle is iterative and also perhaps reactive and needs to involve the various stakeholders in the processes to keep the people who know the processes as close to the development and deployment as possible.

There is significant interest in Legacy to NextGen transition within the  communications and media industry– in fact it is one of the key issues facing service providers right now – and is inherent to other popular catalysts.  This catalyst will generate best practices and identify the interconnection with these other catalysts plus TMF standards.

Sponsorship & Participation

The Optimizing the Move to Next Generation was sponsored by TeliaSonera. 

 
Vendors participating in the project included

• Enterprise Product Management is provided by Tribold
• Service/Resource Catalog was provided by Axiom/Comptel
• Business Activity Monitoring was provided by Vitria

View the Catalyst Demo

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