Information Framework (SID)

TAW Baltimore - almost the end

Josh Salomon — Fri, 22 Jul 2011 01:52:59 GMT

Hi all.

TAW Baltimore is almost finished, still some interesting meeting with the FAST team tomorrow, but most of the week is behind us.

Today we had half a day of the SID team reviewing several contributions, you can find the MoM of the meeting here

We had another meeting with the cloud team reviewing their proposal for using the SID for their products.

For those of you who attended TAW Baltimore, thank you very much for attending, for those who did not attend - this is the best opportunity to get involved and make an impact on the TMF standards, I hope you consider attending next TAW (probably in Madrid, on Jan 2012)

Hope to see you all in TAW Madrid 2012.

Josh

TAW - day 3 summary

Josh Salomon — Thu, 21 Jul 2011 12:28:49 GMT

Hi all,

Time really flies and we are already after the half way mark of TAW Baltimore 2011.

On Wednesday we continues the discussions with the other frameworks and the FAST team on the Frameworx meta model. We talked about the need to add versioning information in order to be able to generate change reports between versions.

We had a long meeting with the catalog management team talking about generalized catalog entity (currently SID includes only ProductCatalog modeled and a very naive ServiceCatalog entity, and about the modeling of interactions with supplier/partner products (assuming some information about such interactions are kept in exported from the S/P catalog to the CSP catalog).

Later in the afternoon Marc Flauw presented the tool created as part of JOSIF project, for partial import of SID into tigerstripe (based on configuration file), This tool have very nice capabilities in taking a complex model (as is the SID) and generate simpler sub model that can be used for interface purpose. You can get more in formation about this in the JOSIF wiki

Tomorrow we are going to review 5 SID contributions, you can see the submitted materials in http://collab.tmforum.org/sf/docman/do/listDocuments/projects.sid/docman.root.taws.taw_baltimore_2011

TAW - day 2 summary

Josh Salomon — Wed, 20 Jul 2011 05:02:39 GMT

Hi all,

First I want to apologize for those who got my blog post yesterday by email, for some reason the post was not converted well to email format - you can see the full post here

As for today we started the joint group meetings. We had several meetings with the business process framework (eTOM) , the application framework (TAM), the interface framework (TIP) and the framework architecture (FAST) teams on issues such as:

Mapping between the frameworks
The Frameworx meta model
Business services
Tooling

All these issues relate to the ability to get synergy from the frameworks and maximizing the value of the Frameworx for the users.

In addition we had a joint meeting with the SES (formerly SDF) team on the changes they want to put to the SID. We identified some small contribution that is required in order to align with their work, but not surprisingly the information framework existing patterns and concepts already support many of the requirements of the SES team.

We also had a short meeting with the TIP team on changes to the performance model.

That is all for today - we have another day full of joint meetings tomorrow.

TAW is in the air ... Hello from Baltimore.

Josh Salomon — Tue, 19 Jul 2011 02:11:01 GMT

Team Action Week 2011 started today with a Frameworx Spotlight session.

In the morning Aileen presented the Frameworx and the benefits service providers can gain from using the Frameworx (2 case studies from China Unicom ($1B gain!) and Mobitel), followed by a presentation by Mark J Arvidson from AT&T on the use of Frameworx in their government business.

Later we split into 6 discussion groups

Deploying Innovative New Services with Frameworx
Enterprise Architecture Transformation
New Service Delivery for Cable MSOs
New Business Models and Services

Commercial Use Cases for Spectrum Management and Network Management Integration Roundtable

Defense Implementers Workshop

Aileen concluded with a presentation on involvement and growth in the Forum's collaboration program, and lastly we had Team gallery (aka speed dating) in which the participants could meet with the various team leaders for discussions on the different team work done in the forum on a glass of beer or wine.

A year in the life...

Andrew McFadyen — Mon, 07 Feb 2011 08:35:26 GMT

I am coming near to the end of my assignment as a Data Architect at Türk Telekom. I have been in Ankara, Turkey, for just over a year now and it has been quite a year; not only because I have experienced and greatly enjoyed the rich Turkish culture, wonderful food and amazing heritage sites, but also because of the work I’ve been doing on Türk Telekom’s “Program Bir” (Programme One).

When I arrived in December 2009, Program Bir, a multi-year, multi-release, complete top-to-bottom re-engineering of Türk Telekoms OSS/BSS, was in the definition phase and the contract for the development and integration of the first release (Release 1) had yet to be let. My new colleagues had done great work with the application architecture and business processes using the TAM and eTOM, but for the data they had done little more than stating that Program Bir would be using the SID (Frameworx Information Model).

The first thing I had to do was “Install SID”, and I don’t just mean downloading SID from the TM Forum and loading it into a modelling tool. Installing SID is lot more complicated than that; some of the steps involved are:

Define how the SID is to be extended, and identify using the eTOM and TAM those ABEs that will need to be extended.
Educate the architects and analysts in the SID vocabulary and important structures.
Guide and negotiate with them and the SI on the interpretation of the SID (see my blog – “No Absolute Truth”).
Tailor the SID and its interpretation it to fit the role it is being used for which includes defining concrete subclasses of some of the abstract classes such as PartyRole.
Extend the SID to take into account the Turkish environment, such as ID cards and Turkish addresses and state structure as well as providing structures to cover the gaps in SID and to store important business information that have no attributes defined in SID.
Define the Master Data Management for all SID ABEs within the scope of the Release.
Define a set of design principals to be applied by the architects, analysts and especially the SI in their use of and changes to the SID covering all the above and giving guidelines on simplify the physical implementation of the model.

When the “Installation” was complete Türk Telekom’s version of SID, called the Common Data Model (CDM), was ready for use, and my job as the Data Architect could get underway.

Program Bir (Release 1) is all about integrating new COTS applications for CRM, Order Management, Network Inventory and Network Management with the many legacy systems that currently make up the OSS in Türk Telekom. All the applications, both new and legacy, were to integrate through a new SOA architecture and an Enterprise Service Bus (ESB).

So, rather than implementing (or reusing the legacy) point-to-point interfaces every application, old and new, is now to communicate over the ESB. New SOA Services were defined by the SOA Architect, and my opposite number in the SI and I pulled the information for each service from the SID (or rather the CDM) and mapped it to an XML structure. As each application that was to be a user or provider of that Service has to map their API, or legacy interfaces to the XML message structure I was fully involved in workshops and meetings throughout the long hot Ankara summer.

The mapping method we used was an Excel spreadsheet projected on the wall showing the basic XML structure. This was a pretty low-tech approach, but it worked, and was well suited to the mass data mapping meetings which seemed to work in the Turkish culture. It would have been simpler to use a tool like Progress DataXtend to do the mappings, but that wasn’t available and everyone was comfortable with Excel, even if its use required a lot of manual effort cross-checking and cutting and pasting mappings and was fraught with version control issues.

Once the two rounds of mapping meetings with each of the major systems owners were over, all the mappings had been issued and approved, and every application had defined how it mapped to the SOA Services’ XML message structure the work of the Data Architect might have been considered to be complete. But there was a vital step still to be undertaken, and one unfortunately, didn’t appear on the SI’s project plan.

I call this step “Business Value Mapping”. We had mapped the attributes in the API’s and legacy systems’ databases to the XML model, but we hadn’t talked about the meaning of the data in these attributes and values that the data could take, and what these values meant. The SI said they usually did this in the integration phase, but I insisted it was done before the detailed design was signed off. There were a lot more very hot (not just because of the climate) meetings as everyone got to grips with this problem. This pain has paid off, I believe, as the integration of the applications over the ESB during integration testing went very smoothly.

Also during detailed design stage a lot of work was done on the Product Catalogue. This was a very satisfying task as marketing and the product managers got to love the SID Product Model. They quickly learned how to use it and how to build reusable Product Specifications that can act as building blocks for future products.

During coding and testing stages of Release 1 I was often required to act as referee on the interpretation of the model and the mappings to the message model. Now as we enter Acceptance Testing I am helping to define Release 2.

But, now it is just about time for me to go and find another project somewhere else, and I can leave Program Bir and possibly Turkey sure that I have helped built a firm foundation for the data architecture of subsequent releases. They did it “My Way”!

TAW - Day 3 short summary

Josh Salomon — Wed, 19 Jan 2011 23:43:59 GMT

My machine has died today so a short post ...
We had today 3 main activities
1 - Explaining the federated model suggestion to various groups, you can find the slides in the FAST team community page
2 - Meeting with TIP SM team on MTOSI harmonization and other issues
3 - Meeting with catalog management team, IPShere and B2B team on catalog modeling for b2b
Sent from my phone :-(

TAW - Day 2 summary

Josh Salomon — Wed, 19 Jan 2011 00:07:09 GMT

Hi All,

Day 2 of TAW is over and this time, Tuesday was the first day for cross team meetings. Today the 3 SID team leads (John Wilmes, John Reilly and myself) had to split for the entire day, with 1 hour exception as we had to cover many topics.

The topics we covered today included:

Cross Frameworks meetings - we talked about mapping of SID-eTOM-TAM (since SID-eTOM mapping already exists we just need to check and verify it, but we also need to prepare the mapping to TAM). We also talked about the Revenue Management work in TAM and eTOM and some of the gaps we have in SID regarding this area.
Meeting with Charging and Billing team - the team will try and find resources for closing some of the gaps we have in SID for this area. Traditionally, from the GBA days, this group focused more on the business side (eTOM and TAM in TMF) and not on the more technical parts (SID and TIP) but they recognize it is time to start working on technical issues as well.
Meeting with Performance Management team to review their enhancements to the SID
We discussed the use of SID for IaaS taxonomy
We reviewed the SES (formerly SDF) team draft IA

Another full day is waiting for us tomorrow as we will split for the entire day again.

I will update again tomorrow.

Hello from Paris, France - It is TAW time again!

Josh Salomon — Mon, 17 Jan 2011 16:58:20 GMT

Well, January is here and it is time for TAW Europe and this time we are in lovely (and chilly) Paris. This time the first day was devoted for Frameworx spotlight for the service providers. In the morning Martin his view on the direction in which the market is moving and the challenges for the service providers, and George Greenlee gave a presentation on high level introduction to the Frameworx. Later in the morning some service providers gave use cases for using the Frameworx as well as key findings on how we can make the Frameworx better and more usable for the service providers.

One of the interesting points raised by Wolfgang Woelker, VP OSS Strategy and Architecture at Deutche Telekom AG was that as a standard body we should expose our standards to everyone and not just to members, since the benefit for the service providers is from the adoption, and wider adoption (by non members as well) is good for everyone.

In the afternoon we split into multiple sessions in which service providers presented their requirements for the future work of TMF in areas such as charging and billing, enterprise risk management, OSS/BSS transformation to just name a few.

The day ended when France Telecom presented their experience they had working with standard bodies, and how they adopted the Frameworx. The day ended with the traditional networking cocktail reception.

As usual we will provide daily blog posts from this TAW, so stay tuned…

Nobody does it better...

Andrew McFadyen — Mon, 03 Jan 2011 15:59:08 GMT

The turning of the year is always a time to look back as well as forwards. This has been particularly true for me this year as it was the first time I had spent this holiday season outside my home country, UK, for many years. I decided to stay in Turkey, where I’ve been working for Turk Telekom, for Christmas and the New Year. The New Year celebrations in Turkey were great fun and I had a wonderful time, but they were very different from the celebrations in UK. As a result I found myself remembering other ‘foreign’ Christmas and the New Year celebrations in Malaysia back in the mid 1990's during my eight years in South East Asia.

Both in Turkey and in Malaysia there is a good deal of copying British and American traditions and I was often asked in both countries, "Do you celebrate like this in England?" or heard comments like "I bet you celebrate this better in England". There seemed to be a belief that the First World has got it all right, and that what goes on in the rest of the world is a pale imitation. This is clearly not the case, in each culture there are different emphasises and different influences and I have had as good a time in Turkey and Malaysia at Christmas and New Year as I have had in England, if not better, particularly when considering the weather. Christmas dinner by the pool in Kuala Lumpur was a wonderful experience!

This inferiority complex extended to the Telecoms companies I worked for in the S.E. Asia region. People at all levels in the organisations were always asking how things were done in UK or USA and assuming that what the systems we were building were not as good as those implemented in the big Telco operators. As my first engagements in telecoms were in S.E. Asia I was unable to provide an opinion and assumed like everyone else that ‘the big boys’ had got everything sorted.

It was a big surprise then, when I returned to England and started working for Telecoms companies there that the OSS/BSS systems we had built in Malaysia, Philippines and Indonesia were in fact streets ahead in both functionality and architecture from the systems in use at some of the most famous names in Telecoms in UK.

That was then, and this is now and I assume through the work of the TM Forum and similar organisations everyone is able to cast off this inferiority complex and have a true view of their position in the world.

But the assumption that everyone else has got the OSS/BSS problems sorted and it is only ‘us’ that are struggling came back to me last month as a result of a problem I’ve had with buying a p.c.

I bought a top of the range laptop for my use in Turkey from Dell UK. I chose the Dell Precision M4500 from the Dell UK website and configured it using their online configurator to my requirements. I had read the specification which spoke of high speed, high performance, state-of-the-art personal computing with things like Bluetooth and WiFi built in and was as a result looking forwards to getting my hands on the new but quite expensive hardware.

Imagine my disappointment when I collected the computer on a trip back home to discover that it had been delivered without WiFi, surely a key component in any modern laptop. Nevertheless I took the new machine back to Turkey with me as I didn’t have time to sort it out in England...

After a lot of investigation and experimentation I established that this was not my fault as I first assumed as it is impossible to order a Dell Precision M4500 with WiFi from Dell UK’s website. With further experimentation I established that it is possible to buy a M4500 with WiFi from the Dell US website, or over the phone from Dell UK’s customer order line. But online on Dell UK’s website you are not given the option of configuring WiFi and the M4500 comes with “Wifi not inlcuded" (sic, their spelling not mine); however the next model in the range, the M6000 does come with WiFi when ordered on the internet, in fact it is impossible to order it online without WiFi.

The penny dropped: it appears to me, at least, that that Dell does not have an Integrated Product Catalogue. The product catalogue is probably not mastered in a single system and is almost certainly copied (manually judging by the spelling mistakes in the on-line catalogue) from order management system to order management system, and yes, there must be multiple order management systems, one per channel, and different ones for different countries.

This was a bit of a shock to discover that the leading on-line computer vendor does not do it better than most telcos and is still struggling with MDM and catalogue management, just like us!

Perhaps Dell should study Frameworx where through the TAM, SID and eTOM they will find a lot of the solutions to their problems but before they do that I really would like them to sort out their website and give me the WiFi card that should have been included in the configuration at no extra charge!

Happy New Year everyone!

Introducing SID – Part Two

Andrew McFadyen — Mon, 20 Dec 2010 09:33:56 GMT

In a previous posting I described my view of the Product Model within TM Formum's Frameworx Information Framework a.k.a, the SID. In this posting I am introducing for people new to Frameworx another strength the SID, namely the PartyRole.

The information in this posting is based on my experience in implementing the SID and is my subjective view of the SID. There are, I am sure, different interpretations of these ideas, but this is how I see the SID and how I've implemented it (see my previous posting on this subject!).

The SID makes a very clear distinction between the roles played by Parties (Businesses, Organisations and People) and the Parties themselves. This can seem to be very pedantic and clumsy when first viewing the SID, so why does the SID do it?

A PartyRole, defined in the SID as

“The part played by a party in a given context with any characteristics, such as expected pattern of behaviour, attributes, and/or associations that it entails.”

This, I admit, is pretty obscure and does little to help a newbie to understand the true strength of this concept.

It is better to understand that 'real world' entities such as People and Businesses exist independently of the Communications company, and these are Parties. The difference between a Party and a PartyRole can be understand by considering a very simple business process "Terminate Customer". Does this process mean that we go out and shoot someone, or simply that we close down the Customer's account? We instinctivly know that Customer and Party are not the same thing, but we haven't had it formally defined before.

When a party interacts with us (the Communications Service Provider) he/she/it plays a role and it is the role the party is playing that we 'see'. How we address them, the functions we allow them to perform depend, not on the party, but the role he/she/it is playing at that time. For example, a person can be an employee, a customer, and the user of a service. As an employee we allow him or her to modify price list entries in the Order Management system for example, but we would not allow a customer to do this. So a Party when playing the role of Employee can do things that he/she cannot do when playing the role of Customer.

The simplest way of visualising this is to consider the PartyRole to be a mask worn by the Party. The PartyRole mask carries on it the information we know about the Party, in this role, as well as defining the PartyRoleType (Employee, Customer, Registered End User) which allows us to identify the range of functions and processes that can be performed by that type of PartyRole.

The Lone Ranger, Zorro and Batman wore masks that defined their name, behaviour and abilities which bore little relationship to the person behind the mask, but thinking that a person can only wear one mask is misleading, and on top of this we see each of these characters without their mask and their interactions, which actually never happens, so far as the SID is concerned.

In the SID the PartyRole mask is much more like the masks worn in the Japanese "Noh theatre", a single actor (Party) can wear many masks, but only one at a time. Each mask represents a different character or role in the play, each with a different personality, name and even gender, and importantly, the audience never gets to see the actor without his mask on. In the same way we, the Communications Service Provider, never interact directly with the Party, he is always wearing one of his many masks.

We subconciously have always known that Parties wear different masks. For example consider the following dialogue between someone calling the 'Customer Call Centre' and the Customer Service Agent (CSA) and read the notes that follow:

CSA (seeing the phone number of the caller, and finding that the number has registered with a name on the companies self-care website against this phone number): "Hello Andrew. What can I help you with today?" NOTE 1

Caller: "Hello. I have just bought a new phone and I can't get MMS to work"

CSA: "OK - we need to update the software on your SIM and on the phone to activate MMS. I will send you a 'technical SMS' in a minute which you must accept and allow it to update your phone"

Caller: "Oh, thank you, and after that I can send MMS's?"

CSA: "Yes, no problem. Is there anything else I can do for you today?"

Caller: "Yes, there is; I need you to change the date you send me the bill. I don't get paid until the 1st of the month and you send me the bill on the 15th, so I have had problems paying you on time." NOTE 2

CSA: "Could you give me the account number and billing address?" NOTE 3

Caller: "Certainly. My account number is 555-12345-X and the billing address is 24 Acacia Avenue, Bristol, BS1 2AB."

CSA: "OK, could you confirm your full name and usual payment method"

Caller: "Andrew McFadyen, and I pay by Direct Debit" NOTE 3

CSA: "OK, thank you Mr McFadyen. I can change your billing date to 5th day of the month. Is that OK?"

Caller: "Yes, that would be great, thank you"

CSA: "Is there anything else I can do for you today, Mr McFadyen?"

Caller: "Oh, yes. I need to order some more prepay cards. I run "Acacia Market", a small store, and I am getting low on suplies of your cards"

CSA: "I'm sorry Mr McFadyen, I can't help you with that. I will pass you over to our Partner Service Agent" NOTE 4

Notes:

This Communications Service Provider has decided that the role established by registering on the website is "End User" and therefore the CSA addresses the Caller as "Andrew" the name used on the website. This approach can be 'dangerous' as a lot of people (in UK at least) use pseudonames like "Mickey Mouse" or "Donald Duck", but it is useful for this scenario. The "End User" Role has a range of processes and functions he can perform, like reporting problems, asking questions and asking for help. The "End User" role is identifed by the Phone number (or other identifier) associated with the Product (subscription).
The caller is trying to switch PartyRoles. He was "End User". In this role he cannot change the Customer Account.
The CSA is effectively saying "Take off the End User mask and put on the Customer mask and prove you have done that by giving me key information about the account." Once the Customer mask is on the role can perform a range of functions or processes including ordering new products changing existing products, changing account details etc.
Again the caller is trying to change masks from "Customer" to "Supplier/Partner". This time the Party wearing the "CSA" mask has a problem. The CSA mask allows the person wearing it to perform a number of functions for End Users and Customers, but he/she is not allowed to deal with Supplier/Partners. The caller has to be referred to someone else who does own the Partner Service Agent mask that is allowed to perform functions that support the Suppliers/Partners.

If the PartyRole concept is taken to its logical conclusion and (somehow) every PartyRole is connected to the correct Party and all the Parties are completely deduped then the Holy Grail of CRM, a single view of the Customer can be achieved, though the reality is that this is a complex and expensive task. However the Party/PartyRole separation is more about understanding and controlling the different functions and processes a Party can perform in different circumstances.

The PartyRole is what SID calls an "abstract concept". Two key "concrete" PartyRoles need to be further discussed: Customer and what I call "End User".

The word Customer is widely used and abused and everyone has their own mental image of what the word means. The Oxford English Dictionary defines Customer as “Buyer; client of bank; (colloq.) ***, awkward etc. ~ (person to be dealt with)”. This is not a very useful definition because it covers a broad set of behaviours and allowed functions.

In CRM - Customer Relationship Management, Customer is 'the whole world' anyone who the company has, is, or will interact with. This is great for CRM, but far to vague if you want to use the PartyRole concept to control the processes and functions that a party can perform in that role.

In the SID the Customer is defined as “A person or organization that buys products and services from the enterprise or receives free offers or services. This is modeled as a Party playing the role of Customer. A Customer is a type of PartyRole. Customers can also be other service providers who resell the enterprises products, other service providers that lease the enterprise's resources for utilization by the other service provider's products and services, and so forth.". This definition is again very broad.

In my experience the a better way of defining Customer is as “The Role Played by the Party in which the Party takes financial and contractual obligation for a Customer Account”. This is a much narrower definition than that used by CRM but allows a clear definition of the functions allowed by this PartyRole. By the way don't think that my definition of Customer omits Pre-paid mobile customers - they still have an account, but it is held in the Pre-paid IN, not the Post-paid Billing System.

So if the Customer is the PartyRole that is responsible for the Customer Account who is the user of the Communications services? Within SID this had not been clearly defined in the past. I implemented the concept of the “End User” PartyRole which I defined as the role played by a party when using a Product (Subscription) and I always added that to the local implementation of the SID in all my assignments.

However SID has recently introduced the PartyRoleProductInvolvement class which can define the Customer involvement in a Product (Subscription). The PartyRoleProductInvolvement is a sub-class of ProductInvolvementRole which is defined as "A role a Party or Resource plays in the relationship to a Product, such as a user, subscriber, owner, and so forth", so we can implement the "End User" in this way, though I still prefer to have "End User" as a PartyRole and link that to the Product through this structure explicitly. (As I said in my previous blog 'there is no right answer' in the SID).

In summary; by using PartyRoles the SID allows the Communications Service Provider to understand why the same Parties are treated differently in different circumstances and the difference between real-world parties and the company’s subjective view of these parties.