Tell us about yourself and your jobI am a technology enthusiast who is slightly obsessed with customer experience. At ServiceNow, I lead product management for our telecom industry, building products and capabilities uniquely designed to enable communication service providers to reinvent the digital experience, move to a new operational cost model, and drive growth through next generation services.
My passion lies in building products that are targeted to solving customer problems and delivering exceptional results. For the past seven years, I have been closely involved in authoring best practices and standards around the customer experience lifecycle model and omni channel customer experience as part of TM Forum Frameworx R15. I must say, it’s been a fun challenge.
Why do you believe in TM Forum’s Open API program?Adhering to standards and having a consistent mechanism to integrate is a key proposition for digital transformation.
Additionally, we believe that behind every great experience – is a great workflow. As CSPs begin to reimagine the customer experience to one that proactively informs customers and resolves issues as they occur, it is critical to connect the customer and agents to operations and the network in a simple and streamlined way. TM Forum’s Open API program ensures interoperability in the evolving digital ecosystem. As the industry continues to transform, Open API’s allow CSPs to evolve a component of their architecture without disrupting the entire ecosystem.
What TM Forum Open APIs are most valuable to your company? The top three we are currently using are:
- Service Catalog API (TMF633)
- Service Inventory Management API (TMF638)
- Alarm Management API (TMF642)
Why did you choose to highlight those APIs? As the topology for a CSP continues to evolve, we see a combination of physical, logical and virtual inventory. CSPs have made significant investments in tools around network assurance to manage both existing and next generation networks. At ServiceNow, we can use this network data and, ultimately, connect the network to the customer. For example, by leveraging existing investments that CSPs have already made in these areas, we are able to correlate the network data to the service and then eventually to the end customer. The alarm management API, service inventory management API and service catalog API allow us to integrate into the existing investments and provide this insight.
How do you use the APIs?Our company provides assurance in the customer and service domains so these Open APIs are mission critical for creating faster and cost-effective integrations with the various vendor ecosystems we are seeing within our customers’ operating and business support systems (OSS/BSS). The ServiceNow platform can automatically create interfaces by importing the machine-readable TM Forum Open API Swagger specification files. From there, on-platform configuration enables mapping the API payloads onto various data constructs within the platform.
How have you benefited from using the Open APIs?The ServiceNow platform out-of-the-box API’s are already being leveraged by customers. By aligning these with TM Forum Open APIs, interoperability with existing ecosystems becomes much more seamless and cost effective for CSPs.
Where do you use them?The adoption of the TM Forum Open APIs is part of our current product innovation and of immediate interest to customers, especially within the European market.
