BT: Modelling a future of faster product delivery

How communications service providers (CSPs) model products can impact everything from the time it takes to deliver services to the visibility operators have of the underlying cost of delivering complex services. Software architects in BT Global explained in a recent webinar how the company is making its product modelling scheme faster and more flexible using the TM Forum Information Framework (SID) and Open APIs.

It is not uncommon for CSPs to spend 12 to 18 months developing new products and services. BT Global, which serves large enterprises, wanted to cut this time significantly when it set out to implement a new product modelling scheme. “We have really struggled, even with data-driven product modelling, to get things out to market quickly and to enhance them as new technologies become available,” said Olivier Wall, Principal Enterprise Architect, BT Global during a recent TM Forum webinar. “We constantly end up with long delivery times and an awful lot of regression testing. In the past, when we built flexibility into the model that we use to drive our IT we almost build something as complex as code and we end up with a kind of coding cycle rather than a configuration cycle and we don’t get the kind of DevOps that we want either.”

BT Global has tackled the problem by applying the Information Framework to product modelling. The framework provides standard definitions for all the information that flows through the enterprise and between service providers and their business partners.

The framework is fundamental to BT Global’s product modelling architecture, Wall explained. The company uses several Open APIs to connect components in its architecture and follows the framework and the way it represents models and products.

Buy-not-build

In addition to improving time to market, BT Global wanted to do away with fragmented legacy IT configurations created in-house and instead move to a buy-not-build approach. Its aim is to reuse solutions, putting them in different commercial wraps for different markets and customers. At the same time, BT Global has to retain product flexibility so it can meet the bespoke demands of larger enterprise projects. “We can talk about standardization, but we won’t win business if we are too rigid. We need to be quick at proposing things we know the cost of that meet the special demands of a contract,” said Wall. “We want to automate the bespoke.” A building block approach also helps BT Global gain greater visibility of the underlying costs of delivering an enterprise service. “We were keen to have a much clearer cost model. We wanted to orient costs around this ‘Lego set’ so that when you put the pieces together to make a product you have a clear idea of the costs beneath the product,” Wall explained. “You can very quickly see a margin when you’re negotiating a deal by looking at the difference between the pricing layer and costs down in lower layers of the model.”

The library collection

An important step towards greater simplification is the creation of a properly governed and finite library of customer facing service (CFS) components, which helps internal teams avoid duplication and the creation of extensions. BT Global is ensuring that “individual CFS’ are independent of supplier,” explained Wall, who gave the example of conferencing capabilities from several third parties. “They will have different APIs, but we’d hide that in the integration layer and have adapters per supplier to deal with lightweight orchestration.” In this way, the number of CFSs do not expand with the introduction of new suppliers. Although the product modelling scheme described by Wall started in BT Global it will spread to other lines of business, allowing the operator over time to reinvent its product set on the new architecture. BT will also contribute parts of its scheme to TM Forum’s Open Digital Architecture (ODA) project.