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TM Forum’s digital ecosystems program is creating the essential open standards for ecosystem management and interoperability, focusing crucially on growth trajectory.
Creating open standards for ecosystem management and interoperability
At TM Forum Action Week in Texas next week, TM Forum members will gather to work on projects which accelerate our members’ ability to design, plan, operationalize and assure new market opportunities through insights, practices and tangible assets enabling a structured, scalable approach to pivoting and commercializing new services. Find out how you can get involved. As new services are created every day through a complex value chain of partners, consistent frameworks are needed to manage these services to ensure scalability and interoperability. TM Forum’s Digital Ecosystems Program is creating the essential open standards for ecosystem management and interoperability. Crucially, the workstreams focus on growth trajectory and use cases that are driving billions of dollars of investments in solving digital service management challenges. The key project areas are business architecture, internet of things (IoT), digital ecosystem monetization, business assurance and smart cities:
A business architecture can help communications service providers (CSPs) strategically plan and design enterprise-side structure and operations with their partners and enterprise customers. Two of the program’s components – the Business Architecture & Capability and the Ecosystem Business Architecture initiative – essentially enable CSPs to establish their place and capabilities in the value fabric, and then design their business strategy based on their core capabilities. The former, enabling more cohesive co-operation between business and technical partners, while the latter manages ecosystem business strategy and operations. “It’s about building a strategy underpinned by strategic advantage,” explains Joann O’Brien, VP, Ecosystems & Labs, TM Forum, “In the context of an ever-changing economy, where things are moving much more quickly, building a strategy around something that gives you more resilience is a good idea. There are some practical aspects to this, however it’s also strategic.”
An IoT network could potentially connect billions of devices far and wide, with forecasters agreeing there will be up to 75 billion connected devices worldwide by 2025 as 5G speeds proliferation. But it’s unclear how they will be managed. To help ease the management burden of IoT devices and IoT as a service, the ecosystem collaboration group is working on building: This work will also help businesses design and develop scalable IoT services as demand grows. The team is seeking further use cases and will be reviewing possible additions at Action Week.
This workstream looks at business model reinvention covering matters such as growing your business through new types of services, and how to effectively manage the charging and billing aspects in a complex ecosystem context. Ensuring financial integrity in complex ecosystems is a requirement for the future. This team leverages different ecosystem contexts, evaluates the potential different business models and provides guidance on how to best ensure effective, scalable charging and billing.
TM Forum’s Business Assurance project was launched about two years ago, although its roots still lie in fraud and revenue management. Today it has a wider remit: how to assure financial integrity and address customer impacting risks in a complex partnering and ecosystem context, both from a planning perspective and a controls perspective. It’s also about any subsequent remediations, of course. “We believe that the future is about companies having an awful lot more partnering aspects that they need to manage,” O’Brien explains. “So business assurance integrates assurance and risk management disciplines into an overall proactive data-centric assurance framework, with the goal of continuously protecting and improving financial integrity, while enhancing business value and customer experience.”
There are three streams to the Forum’s smart cities work: Data model harmonization – “The Forum has built a historic group of activities around the Information Framework and Open APIs,” O’Brien says. “These assets are widely adopted, so we want to make sure that as new data models are being developed in different verticals, they are harmonized at a construct level so that we’ve set the foundations in place for interoperability for our members.” Business Framework API component suite – “The Forum wishes to work with members to redevelop this component suite which are the minimum essential APIs that are used in an ecosystem context such as offering, billing and settlement.” Smart city operating model – “We are working collaboratively with the Inspur team and cities in China to develop an initial contribution. This will lay the foundation to build up what we believe to be a smart city operating model. The model provides the foundation of process elements, accelerating its design for automation.” The new Digital Ecosystem program welcomes new project team members. Find out more and join the project team at Action Week, or contact me directly for more information. We look forward to meeting you in Dallas!
