The TM Forum’s technical and business framework and standards setting provides a framework within which OSS/BSS applications can be easily interconnected to form flow-through systems. With widespread adoption by software vendors, integrators and telcos themselves, the major benefit is to reduce the so-called ‘integration tax’ levied by systems integration work. New Generation OSS systems, conforming with TM Forum standards under our key body of work, NGOSS (New Generation Operations Systems and Software) are designed to interwork with other compliant systems to share data where necessary (to access a common customer directory, for instance) or to participate in automated flow-through processes such as service provisioning or activation.
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Perhaps as important, the development of and adherence to strong standards and frameworks for interoperability enables telcos to pick best-of-breed system and software components and have them work together with minimal ‘integration tax’. This in turn creates a viable ‘COTS’ (commercial off the shelf) software market: instead of creating expensive, one-off systems to meet the exact specifications of each network operator, software providers are able to develop once and sell many times, benefiting the entire industry. To help promote this trend the TM Forum has developed some key tools. The Enhanced Telecom Operations Map (eTOM) defines a process framework which enables operators to ‘decompose’ their own processes so that they can understand them and map them into flows.
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TMF’s Telecom Applications Map (TAM) relates the abstract processes revealed in eTOM and links them to the applications which can execute them.
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TMF standards and frameworks are designed to enable telcos to evolve their IT environments to enable real data sharing and process automation - replacing information islands with a seamless OSS/BSS environment that supports the rapid delivery and management of complex, next generation services. TMF’s Shared Information/Data (SID) standard is critical for this development.
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The TMF ensures its standards actually get implemented through its Prosspero initiative which packages working open-source code, testing frameworks, guidebooks, online developer support, development tools and access to reference implementations.
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