Service Management: Thoughts on trends

Mark Francis Vice President AT&T

Over the past year, I have made the most significant shift in role that one can fathom, from being responsible for the overall Enterprise Architecture and Strategic Direction to owning the Global Network Operations Center. Some might call this a sadistic form of punishment, but I relish in the opportunity to fully understand the operational complexities and consequences of Architecture and Implementation decisions.

I will tell you this, now that I am a fully certified operations guy (grin!), I believe the most complex challenge our industry will face in the future is End-to-End Service Management. What does this mean? The ability to look at the service from a customer’s perspective and aggregate away the complexities of multiple network layers and software layers to truly understand that individual customer’s service experience. Wow!

From a Service Providers perspective, what this starts to look like is a blending of Network and IT, where the service is delivered riding over a combination of things that look like network elements and things that look like IT application servers. Together, all of these assets create the total Customer Experience. This means that in the future, it will not be good enough to have a Network Operations Center; we will require Service Operations Centers.

Within TMF, the Board of Directors has been spending considerable energy on understanding future Supply Chain directions and this issue of End-to-End Service Management. I believe TMF is on the cusp of defining a whole new set of standards areas and definitions that will establish the new focus for our future ability to not only deliver new and exciting converged services efficiently, but just as importantly, the ability to manage them at Service Provider quality.

If you have been giving this some thought and want to discuss, I would be happy to hear form you.

Mark Francis is Vice President, Global Network Operations Center, AT&T

Mark’s responsibilities include management of AT&T’s Global Network Operations Center (GNOC), the most sophisticated command-and-control center of its kind in the world. The GNOC provides incident command, network risk management, performance reporting, regulatory compliance reporting, National Security Emergency Preparedness, and executive notification for the AT&T Global Network. Proactive network management and command oversight of network infrastructure, network technology elements, operational support applications/systems, work centers, and data centers across multiple AT&T business units and lines of business. In addition, Mark manages and communicates the “Ask Yourself” process, which is a documented approach ensuring the project management and quality assurance of all planned work on AT&T's World Wide Network uses a global change management discipline. In addition, Mark is responsible for network continuity, contingency planning, and disaster recovery of AT&T Network Services infrastructure worldwide including voice, data services, and humanitarian relief deployments for wireline and wireless networks.