The eTOM Business Process Framework represents the whole of a service provider’s enterprise environment. The Business Process Framework begins at the Enterprise level and defines business processes in a series of groupings. The Framework is defined as generically as possible so that it is organization, technology and service independent and supports the global community. At the overall conceptual level (see Figure 1), eTOM can be viewed as having the following three major process areas:

• Strategy, Infrastructure & Product covering planning and lifecycle management
• Operations covering the core of operational management
• Enterprise Management covering corporate or business support management

The process structure in eTOM uses hierarchical decomposition, so that the business processes of the enterprise are successively decomposed in a series of levels. Process descriptions, inputs and outputs, as well as other key elements are defined. The eTOM process modeling depicts process flows in a vertical swim lane approach that drives end-to-end process and process flow-through between the customer and the supporting services, resources and supplier/partners.

The Framework also includes views of functionality as they span horizontally across an enterprise’s internal organizations. For example, managing customer relationships spans an enterprise from marketing to ordering to billing to after-service support and follow-on sales.

A particular strength of eTOM as a business process framework is that it is positioned within the NGOSS program and links with other work underway in NGOSS. In particular, eTOM provides the Business Map for NGOSS and is a prime driver for business requirements to feed through from the NGOS Business View to the System View and eventually into the NGOSS Implementation and Deployment Views.
The focus of eTOM is on the business processes used by service providers, the linkages between these processes, the identification of interfaces, and the use of customer, service, resource, supplier/partner and other information by multiple processes.

The eTOM Business Process Framework can be used as a tool for analyzing your organization’s existing processes and for developing new processes. Different processes delivering the same business functionality can be identified, duplication eliminated, gaps revealed, new process design speeded up, and variance reduced. Using eTOM, you can assess the value, cost and performance of individual processes within your organization.

You can facilitate your relationships with suppliers and partners by identifying and categorizing the processes you use in interactions with them. In a similar manner, you can identify the all-important customer relationship processes and evaluate whether they are functioning as required to meet your customers’ expectations.

Some of the specific business benefits of using the eTOM within your organization are:

• It develops a scope addressing all enterprise processes.
• It distinctly identifies marketing processes to reflect their heightened importance in an ebusiness world.
• It distinctly identifies Enterprise Management processes, so that everyone in the enterprise is able to identify their critical processes, thereby enabling process framework acceptance across the enterprise.
• It brings Fulfillment, Assurance and Billing (FAB) onto the high-level framework view to emphasize the customer priority processes as the focus of the enterprise.
• It defines an Operations Support & Readiness vertical process grouping, that relates to all the Operations functional layers. In integrating ebusiness and making customer self-management a reality, the enterprise has to understand the processes it needs to enable for direct and (more and more) online customer operations support and customer self-management.
• It recognizes three process groupings within the enterprise that are distinctly different from operations processes by identifying the SIP processes, i.e., Strategy & Commit, Infrastructure Lifecycle Management and Product Lifecycle Management.
• It recognizes the different cycle times of the strategy and lifecycle management processes and the need to separate these processes from the customer priority operations processes where automation is most critical. This is done by decoupling the Strategy & Commit and the two Lifecycle Management processes from the day-to-day, minute-to-minute cycle times of the customer operations processes.
• It moves from the older customer care or service orientation to a customer relationship management orientation that emphasizes customer self-management and control, increasing the value customers contribute to the enterprise and the use of information to customize and personalize to the individual customer. It adds more elements to this customer operations functional layer to represent better the selling processes and to integrate marketing fulfillment within Customer Relationship Management. Note that Customer Relationship Management within the eTOM framework is very broadly defined and larger in scope than some definitions of CRM.
• It acknowledges the need to manage resources across technologies, (i.e., application, computing and network), by integrating the Network and Systems Management functional process into Resource Management & Operations. It also moves the management of IT into this functional layer as opposed to having a separate process grouping.
• It recognizes that the enterprise interacts with external parties, and that the enterprise may need to interact with process flows defined by external parties, as in ebusiness interactions.