The TM Forum has been successful in building a suite of comprehensive specifications. A key challenge is ensuring that TM Forum specifications remain useful and relevant in the fast moving business world. This challenge can be viewed from a number of perspectives:
- Changes are appropriately compatible with existing implementations and applications (i.e. appropriately Backward Compatibility)
- Changes are clearly justified and their impact is clearly understood
- Future specifications are designed to better accommodate change
Rather than focus on ‘reactive’ backward compatibility, the TPC Taskforce has taken a more holistic approach and has looked at how to ‘proactively’ enable future changes required to meet business needs, hence “lifecycle compatibility”. The analysis has been driven by the following requirements distilled from network operator input and from the TPC Charter Addendum:
- Support growth/change in functional need
- Enable versatile interaction
- Facilitate asynchronous upgrades across solution
- Provide appropriate mechanisms to support change
- Maximise adoption throughout change and evolution
The investigations have shown that there is no ‘silver bullet’ to deal with the challenge of lifecycle compatibility; there are a range of proposals and these emerged by blending considerations from a broad analysis that examined process improvement, enhanced tool utilisation and advanced design methods.
For further information on the Architecture Harmonization team click here
Declaration of Patent Interest Form
If you would like help on this material or to join current discussions please visit the Technical Program Council Community Area
Return to the Architecture Harmonization Home page