Using CurateFX to join forces and enhance the driver experience

Use of collaborative business models and co-creation are on the rise, but building digital ecosystems can be difficult. Stakeholders often come from different industries and ‘speak’ different languages, and open application program interfaces (APIs) are needed to communicate between systems. A recent, award-winning TM Forum Catalyst proof of concept has demonstrated how TM Forum’s CurateFx cloud-based, software-as-a-service tool can help companies address the challenges of partnering.

Participants in the Driver connect – Fueling a personalized customer experience with AI Catalyst project had a complex web of partners and processes to work through to create a personalized connected driver journey for project champion Jaguar. The team used CurateFx and subsequently, won the prize of Outstanding CurateFx ecosystem design at Digital Transformation World 2019.

CurateFx is built on components of TM Forum’s Open Digital Framework (ODF) Frameworx and Open APIs, as well as the Forum’s Partnering Toolkit . It provides step-by-step blueprints, information-based decision tools, visualization maps and other collaborative capabilities so that partners can quickly and easily develop business scenarios.

The challenge

In a previous case study, we broke down how the project participants – Salesforce, Nokia, Cerillion and TechSee – addressed Jaguar’s business challenge using artificial intelligence (AI), big data, 5G and other technologies. In this piece, we look at how all project stakeholders used CurateFx to: Customer management, service orchestration and service delivery remain key challenges and are prevalent within the project’s three main use cases, all of which feature AI and predictive analytics in some way:

1 - Branded handover experience – Prepare to hand car over to customer by pre-configuring a vehicle with recommended 5GAA services, and visual assistance to explain the car’s features using virtual reality.

2 – Personalized service – Provide concierge level service for a vehicle needing roadside assistance for example, enabling the customer to manage their service. Also sharing a 360-degree customer view with stakeholders.

3 – Customer journey with electric vehicle – Harmonize digital and physical journeys by integrating partner capabilities to provide a personalized experience for electric vehicle ownership.

• Clarify and harmonize project goals, including vision, project statement, stakeholder roles and key drivers
• Map processes
• Map the entire ecosystem, including stakeholder details and their roles
• Illustrate the use case, including user and process flows

Providing the blueprint

CurateFx provided the team with the blueprint to define its services and business model, a graphical user interface to design the ecosystem with its many interactions, and a set of TM Forum’s most widely adopted best practices and standards embedded into point and click models to enable business and IT to be ready for implementation together. Everyone participating and designing the project had the same view in CurateFx and therefore the same context to work from. The CurateFx service consists of multiple steps or phases: define, design, enable and collaborate.

• Define –this phase sets up the business scenario, looking at what each participant needs to provide.
• Design –teams specify the relationships between partners and stakeholders using capabilities derived from the B2B2X partnering guide, looking at every facet whether operational, contractual, financial, etc.
• Enable –participants use the ODF's Frameworx tools such as the Business Process Framework, the Information Framework and Open APIs to determine how to implement the ecosystem. This phase bridges the gap between the business view of product management, business architecture or business development staff and the implementation view of IT staff – which is needed to make a service come to life.
• Collaborate –this happens in all phases and allows teams to co-create, co-design, share and export.

Define

For a strong, well-defined foundation upon which to base the project, participants used the tools in CurateFx to be prescriptive in the outcomes they sought and their own role in these outcomes. “We did quite a lot of work early on,” says Abhi Sur, Global Solutions Lead for Communications Industry at Salesforce. “This was the detail we had to provide when we submitted the Catalyst so it was very easy for us to carry that information over.” As an example, TechSee, which provides augmented reality (AR) roadside assistance, delivered the project’s interactive visual guidance for sales and servicing. In the problem statement, TechSee clarified what it needed to do and how to fulfill its goal of converting “customer anxiety to delight”, while also defining success metrics for measurable achievements.

Problem statement

There were five vision statements and eight key drivers which the relevant stakeholder(s) highlighted for each. For example, TechSee was key in two of the vision statements and three of the key drivers:

Vision statements

Key drivers

Design

The ecosystem designer dramatically simplified the modelling of the complex ecosystem stakeholders and their relationships with guided design based on proven best practices from the TM Forum partnering guide. Using a simple drag and drop interface, they mapped the relationships between all the stakeholders, and then detailed the relationships selecting from pre-populated categories from the partnering guide, including financial, operational, contractual and data.

“You can see here for example, how CSPs can help with the data,” explains Sur. “We know that the CSP essentially builds the connectivity layer, and you can also see the sponsor data relationship that they would have with any other digital service provider, Jaguar in our case. The whole idea is: What kind of relationship with a CSP have with the enterprise? It’s typically a sponsor data relationship, or whatever other business models can become established between them.” With its color coding and filtering capabilities, the team were able to easily identify any issues with the design of the ecosystem such as find where it was missing relationships. Each case study had a diagram that was constructed similarly to the overall ecosystem design illustrated above (see image below), although of course this time the diagram specifies the interactions within the use case, e.g. Vehicle owner -> Tracks order. Accompanying the case study diagram, we also see a challenges and benefits breakdown from the stakeholder’s perspective.

Enable

The team leveraged the Frameworx mapping tool within CurateFx to ensure the ecosystem design to be ready for implementation with TM Forums best practices and standards. This included the process name, type of framework (for example, Business Process Framework or Information Framework), any assigned stakeholders, and a brief and extended description detailing the purpose of the process and how it should play out. With CurateFx users have the full drill-down capability to the lowest level of the models. With relationships and descriptions provided throughout, they can simply point and click and identify the parts of all the models that map to their scenario. This integrated capability enables IT and business teams to work together to define very clear requirements for projects in a language that they can both understand. “Curate FX can be used to map not only the TM forum models, but any architectural model or functional capability model that an enterprise may have,” says Sur. “We did not do it, but it can be done.” Having TM Forum models in CurateFx provided the project guide rails for its ecosystem designs and enabled consistent decision-making at the business/IT interface.

Conclusion

For Sur, the clarity in project communications was the best part of using CurateFx. “We had people from seven different countries working on this project, so all definitions, roles, process, etc., had to be absolutely clear and concise,” he explains. “If I had to put all this information in a PowerPoint, or in a Word document, I don't know how I would have done it. It gives me a platform to model the project, and to communicate it to the executives to make the business case as a standardized platform business modelling tool, which can be understood stood by people who are in that space.” He adds: “This tool be used at multiple levels within the various organizations – to sell into executives through the high-level views, and can also by the likes of CIOs, project managers, delivery managers and architects. It is very flexible.”