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|  |  |  |  Strategic Transformation for the Digital Economy
Insights Report #1
Now Available to TM Forum Members
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Service providers have to build a bridge between where they are now and where they want to be in the digital economy of information, media and entertainment delivery. Though they’ve managed to stretch their margins around voice and voice-related services for much longer than expected, the writing is on the wall. Service providers will be relegated to the role of "dumb pipe" unless they consider new retail, wholesale and value-add models where they can be enablers to all stakeholders, including advertisers, retailers, media companies, content suppliers, financial institutions, government agencies and utilities.
Most stakeholders in the digital media value chain wish to avoid reinventing the wheel, so service providers have a chance to leverage their networks, support systems and real-time "knowledge" of the customer to become indispensable enablers of digital services.
Profitability should be a key focus going forward, which means business transformation will be necessary to drive service innovation, customer loyalty and cost reduction. To achieve all three, service providers have to also consider the technology transformation that will improve profitability. The ease with which service provider’s handle Procurement, Resource Management and Product Lifecycle Management will be key factors.
By thinking about transformation holistically from a business and technology standpoint, service providers can more successfully:
- De-risk investments
- Lower of integration costs
- Re-use existing components to build new services
In this report, sponsored by Nokia Siemens and written by TM Forum and Telco 2.0, service providers get guidance for the steps to take toward business and technology transformation.
Transform To Become a Service-Oriented Enterprise
Because transformation is a “continuum,” not an isolated event, there should be ongoing effort to use metrics to ensure the business goals are aligned with business models. This report offers guidance into matching metrics to organizational structures so there are baselines of organizational performance that fuel transformation efforts.
The guidance offered in this report will help organizations determine what is “best-in-class” from a benchmarking perspective so that they can gauge the impact of new services on the customer experience. By measuring and comparing their current position against a baseline position, service providers can see where they are, and set reasonable goals to resolve problem areas as they progress. It is powerful to have a warning about where costs can get out of control and where customer experience may suffer if a change in focus is undertaken without consideration of all peripheral impacts to customers.
Once organizations are clear about the direction they want to take, they can consider the people, processes, data and applications that will feed their goals. Because a post-voice, telco 2.0 world will rely on creative partnering, there will be many moving parts to manage, including: devices, networks, content, advertising, service assurance, customer service, operations support systems, real-time charging, billing, and revenue assurance.
To forge essential partnerships, service providers will have to possess unprecedented flexibility and agility to work with multiple partners. That flexibility is the key to becoming a Service-Oriented Enterprise (SOE), an organization that possess the flexibility to achieve rapid assembly of services through decomposition of existing systems. To truly build an SOE, service providers have to understand the inter-relationships among business processes, information models, applications, support systems and networks. And they must understand how to map those elements to information, media and entertainment companies, which of course have their own sets of business processes, information models, applications and support systems.
Without standard formats or interfaces for transmitting and receiving content, the process of delivering content is very inefficient and arduous, as content providers are forced to tailor content differently for each service provider partner. In this report, key inter-relationships among core TM Forum programs are outlined to help service providers understand how service assembly and delivery can be standardized through:
- Solution Frameworks (NGOSS)
- Business Process Framework (eTOM)
- Information Framework (SID)
- Application Framework (TAM)
- Interfaces to tie them all together (OSS/J, MTOSI, IPDR, COOP)
Also described are exciting new initiatives that bring all the pieces together to take "friction" out of the value chain and to expedite the creation and assembly of innovative services that will lure customers and build brand loyalty:
- Value Chain Initiative
- Business Transformation Blueprint Initiative
- Stakeholders Group
- Systems Integrator Group
- Concept-to-Market
- Managing Customer Experience
These initiatives help service providers transform so that they can match service quality to customer expectations. By getting a holistic view of business processes, information stores and applications, service providers can better align business and IT goals. This report talks specifically about the evolution of core TM frameworks to build bridges between IT and business objectives.
With the alignment of IT and business organizations, service providers are better positioned to build “Business Services” (NGOSS Contracts) that relate to standard business functions. If organizations can adopt a horizontal or modular approach to assembling services, they can decompose and re-assemble existing pieces to build services according to customer demands.
To meet customer demands, service providers have to increasingly study the "customer experience," which starts before the customer is a consumer of services, to the point after consumption where there is opportunity to then recommend the service to friends, family and co-workers. In this report, communications, media and entertainment learn how to embrace that same customer-centric focus as retail and automotive industries have done for years. This report will tie TM Forum enabling frameworks to the value chain and ultimately the customer experience impacted by the cohesiveness of that chain.
Service providers have more to gain than to lose with Business and Technology Transformations, as they are the only means by which they can both save millions of dollars in software customizations, as well as generate millions of dollars with innovative services that will evolve in a Web 2.0 world. That evolution will happen whether traditional service providers are part of it or not. Survival and longevity will come from creating a brand and services that win customers’ loyalty in an expanding value chain.
That can only happen through support systems, business processes, and data that all work with the same goal in mind.
Three Parts
This three-part report will first examine the communications, media and entertainment market as it exists today, and what is predicted for it in the years to come.
The second part of the report will examine which standards, frameworks and interfaces will enable service providers to fill different roles that service providers can play as retailers, wholesalers and VAS suppliers.
The third section of the report will demonstrate real-world case studies of actual service providers that are in various stages of “Transformation,” whether planning, execution, or evolution to the next phase.
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