A Spirit of Service

This is my last blog post as employed staff with the TM Forum.  I look forward to continue supporting the work of the TM Forum as a member again.  I write a next chapter in my career as I return to the realm of communications industry consulting for Service Provider clients.

For the most part, TM Forum frameworks are often called “service agnostic.”   In other words, the frameworks represent abstract models that support the common aspects of communications services—for the most part, any service—at least from a management perspective.   This generic aspect of Frameworx continues to serve the expanding scope of the industry well.  The models are intended to be frameworks, which are—by design–missing custom aspects that are often needed to make an implementable solution by full reference.

Times are changing, and Service Providers today need both agility and lean interoperability in the right places, but not all integration points.  Common architecture continues to play a vitally important role in both cost effectiveness and agility, but I believe that architecture can easily be overused for changes that are innovative, experimental, or in an early stage of development.   These changes include things like new product, services, processes, etc.  Until such changes become proven from a business and financial perspective, it easy for the engineer in us to overdo architectural alignment and conformance.  Sure, it sometime costs more to align things later, but it also often costs more, in both effort and invaluable time to market, to apply a heavy dose of architecture at the formation of change.  There are always exceptions, but I believe this pattern and balancing opportunity is generally true in the majority of cases of significant transformation and change.

Today, different TM Forum members need different solutions for many different challenges and opportunities.   A common approach in Frameworx is an important core, but we need service-specific business and management solutions for things—examples include defense network services, cloud services, and emerging new services like open APIs and advertising-based business models.

I encourage the best of my fellow brave, contributing members among us to deeply believe and commit to “the spirit of service.”  It’s time for us to use, simplify, complement, and extend the “agnostic” aspects of Frameworx with the more “spiritual” aspects of specific new types of services.  This means contributing to new best practices and standards as reference solutions for specific types of services that matter for your business environment.

It has been my pleasure to serve you all, wishing you my best in spirit.