While I spend a fair bit of my time looking over the horizon at whats going to impact the industry in the coming three years, it's easy to forget that it is the simple things that we currently have to get right in order to survive in the current marketplace. I spent the last week at an interesting event in Panama that was attended by a good number of Latin American C-levels. While people are aware of the emerging issues of Cloud Computing, App Stores and 4G/LTE, most of their interest is around current day challenges of streamlining processes, improving data integrity and getting the basics right in Customer Experience.
The core mission of the TM Forum has always been to help our members survive and thrive in the communications management marketplace. The building blocks that all our members use to approach this challenge are our
Business Process Framework (the eTOM); our
Information Framework (the SID); and our
SOA-based Integration Framework. The majority of the companies I met last week were very familiar with all of these core building blocks, and many were successfully using them to rationalise their current operations to allow them to improve productivity on current services, and implement improvements in customer expereince. The importance of
benchmarking as a business improvement tool was also highlighted as companies realise that productivity or customer experience improvement programs are meaningless unless you can objectively measure yourself beforehand and post the improvement actions. The other core guideance provided by our
Service Level Agreement handbook and our
Revenue Assurance handbook were also mentioned as providing immediate and short-term benefits.
So while the Forum provides alot of thought leadership on the industry challenges of tomorrow, its nice to be reminded that we also provide the basics that the industry needs to be successful today!
Posted
11-16-2009 7:40 AM
by
Martin Creaner