In the current climate of the telecoms industry, Service Providers (SPs) face an ever-changing environment, particularly as the industry moves towards Next Generation Networks (NGN). Within this, management of the businesses, and their products and services, is also evolving, to cope with new technology and services, and new ways of doing business.

Thus, change is a continuing pressure and is manifested as a never-ending “creep” in the business at all levels,

From a TM Forum Board perspective, it is seen that more analysis and detail is needed to assist SPs, SIs and others to address these issues, and hence a Migration Task Force has been set up from the TM Forum Board SI Committee to study and report on ways forward. This document sets out the work of this Task Force and their conclusions and recommendations.

The overall approach used in the study has been to:

• Interview selected SPs on their migration issues and identify common industry priorities in this area
• Define clear migration principles and procedures to allow operators to have a common approach
• Capture the knowledge, and structure it to provide a common, high-level view of SP migration strategy/strategies

Specific results from the Study are:

• to clarify specific needs based on SP experience (through interviews), that impact on Integration and the role of the SI, in a way that SPs, SIs and others can recognize and agree
• to prioritize these needs in a way that assists SIs (and Suppliers with an SI interest) in focusing on appropriate "best practice" to address them
• to begin (at least) to gather input on "best practice" in line with these needs and priorities, from the SI Board Committee and any SIs (and others) who can contribute experience and suggestions for this
• to begin (if possible) to distil a framework for relevant and helpful migration procedures that SIs can adopt and which SPs will recognize and support
• to begin (if possible) to define requirements for tools that support and facilitate these procedures to identify relevant wider industry experience and input that may bear on all this

The deliverable is in the form of this document that overviews the migration topics, draws conclusions (interim if appropriate) and highlights further work.

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