Knowing what your business is capable of is the first step

In a technology organization such as a communications service provider (CSP), it’s easy to become too focused on how to deliver new services. But most companies need to take a step back and figure out what their business capabilities are in the first place.

As part of a new TM Forum collaboration initiative called the Business Architecture, BT, Deutsche Telekom, Verizon, Vidéotron and Vodafone are leading an effort to create an agreed, baseline business capability map for the telecoms industry. Over the past year, the companies met several times to share their own capability maps and worked together to develop one that is harmonized.

Members of the team presented the first version of the TM Forum Business Capability Map at Action Week this week in Lisbon, Portugal. The map is currently available to team members for review but will be published to the broader membership for commentary in the coming weeks.

“There are two fundamental questions you try to answer as a business: How do you know you’re spending money in the right areas, and how can you spot common areas for development?” said Tony Shepherd, Principal Business Architect, Business Architecture and Process Excellence, BT. “In an environment where everything is changing all the time, that business-outcome approach is critical.

“This is the what you do,” he added. “I’ll repeat that: This is the what you do – not the how.”

Michel Boudrias, General Manager of Architecture and Planning at Vidéotron, agreed. “Often when we start planning, we dive right into the technology, which is a mistake. We need to bring the discussion back to where it should be: If you want to turn a capability into a new product, how do you make sure you have the right capabilities? How do you know how far you are from where you want to be?”

A common language

The agreed capability map gives companies a common language, taxonomy and glossary to describe business capabilities. The images below, taken at Action Week, show the top-level core, supporting and strategic capabilities that have been agreed, such as customer management, product management, IT management and partner management. On the map these capabilities are then broken down further into Level 2 and Level 3 capabilities (for example, customer identification or product definition).

“The primary use for this work is around strategic planning,” explained Joann O’Brien, TM Forum’s VP of Digital Ecosystems. “It helps operators understand their business capabilities, most importantly what their unique capabilities are that they can exploit to set themselves apart.”

It’s important to note that the Business Capability Map does not focus only on existing capabilities, but also those the business may have in the future.

“This helps you think about capabilities you might need to partner to acquire or make future investments in,” O’Brien said. “It’s also thinking holistically about the business. Capabilities are not processes, services, functions or technologies, but they can be mapped to all these things.”

Mapping to the how

At Action Week, the Ecosystem Business Architecture team joined with the teams that are developing TM Forum Frameworx and the TM Forum Open Digital Architecture to discuss mapping the business capabilities to existing TM Forum assets. By doing this, CSPs will be able to easily understand which assets they can use to improve business capabilities or to partner. For example, if a company wants to improve order management, they will be able to figure out easily which Frameworx business processes or Open APIs can help them do that.

“The idea is to align the business architecture work to all the other assets of TM Forum so that operators have an accelerated ability to de-risk the implementation of their strategic activities,” O’Brien explained. “This new work provides the complete foundation for business architecture for our industry, providing a reference for members to generate their company-specific capability map quickly.”

If you’re interested in learning more or getting involved, please contact Joann O’Brien.