Prior Release 17.5
TM Forum Collaboration Projects address Critical Challenges for Navigating Transformation, creating Business Agility and Managing Digital Ecosystems
Since September 2017, hundreds of individuals from a diverse range of member companies have worked together using TM Forum’s unique collaborative environment in 12 projects to deliver solutions to challenges facing businesses in the digital ecosystem. The results of their work are now available to TM Forum’s global membership, enabling all members to benefit from the new toolkits, best practices, maturity models, guides and technical reports within their businesses.
As a member, you can download and make use of all the important tools across a broad range of topics. TM Forum Frameworx continues to be the most widely used blueprint for effective and efficient business operations. We have outlined the highlights below so you can download and start using them today!
To access our full library of documents, visit the Resources Library section.
If you have any immediate questions, please email us at [email protected]
Release 17.5 Highlights
Reimagined OSS/BSS for zero-touch operations:
TM Forum members working in the ZOOM project (Zero-touch Orchestration, Operations and Management) Procurement and Onboarding suite as part of its Agile OSS toolkit.
Onboarding automation has been cited by multiple service providers, such as AT&T, Orange, Vodafone, Verizon and others, as an unexpectedly difficult challenge and a major business priority for pragmatic resolution. This suite of documents captures the team’s recommendations on the VF package metadata definitions:
- IG1141 Procurement and Onboarding of Virtualization Packages R17.5.0 highlights the challenges of onboarding automation.
- IG1141A Onboarding Automation: Package ID, Software Assets and License Management Support R17.5.0 addresses how virtualization in Service Providers’ networks and associated resources and services will impact the licensing models.
- IG1141B Onboarding Automation: VF Categorization and Orchestrateability R17.5.0 provides detailed analysis and recommendations on how a standardized Virtual Function (VF) categorization and package type may help the automation of VF procurement and onboarding processes.
The TMF070 suite of blueprint documents is an exciting piece of work providing a guide to creating a management platform that meets the needs of today’s business dynamics. The blueprint brings together multiple elements into one set of tools including key practical assets such as Open APIs, information models, best practices and deployment guides. Together these provide the standard interface required for multi-vendor hybrid deployments.
A new document, TR263E Context Management addresses the definition of contexts between a party offering capabilities and another party using such capabilities. A context entails access rights for APIs, access rights for resource types associated with each API and various resource instance limits.
IG1162 impacts of AI/ML on operations covers the initial analysis of the impact of AI/ML on the Operations Center of the Future operational practices. It is intended to stimulate debate and help identify the critical industry actions needed to support AI/ML adoption by Digital and Communications Services Providers.
The TR255 series contains requirements, uses cases and protocol-neutral models for an activation and configuration API concerning resource functions. Resource functions are a generalization and abstraction of various industry concepts including the ETSI NFV concepts of VNF, PNF VNF Forwarding Graph and Network Service, and the SDN concepts of Service Function and Service Function Chain. The use cases and requirements where used to drive the definition of an associated TM Forum Open API, i.e. TMF664 Resource Function Activation and Configuration.
At the same time, TM Forum’s core frameworks continue to evolve, bringing in the latest work from its member-driven collaboration programs and integrating it with the established Business Process Framework (eTOM), Information Framework (SID), and Application Framework (TAM) models and best practices to ensure they continue to remain at the forefront of digital business transformation. This includes a refresh of the established training courses to ensure they remain fully up-to-date with the latest uses of Frameworx for transformation to propel agile digital businesses.
TM Forum Open APIs
TM Forum’s Open API collaborative team has added 4 new Open API specifications to the portfolio of Open APIs and a new Open API Map. This brings the total number of available Open APIs to 52. The latest release includes:
- New APIs will improve and ensure consistent management of product and service catalog, quotes and ordering. These are the Product Catalog Management API, Product Ordering API, Service Catalog Management API, Quote Management API.
- Mapping and alignment from several Open APIs to the Information Framework (SID) enabling ease of implementation.
The Internet of Everything (IoE) and Game Changing Technologies
The collaboration projects in TM Forum’s IoE Program are working on pragmatic solutions to the challenges relating to monetization, management and trust (MMT) in the context of creating and managing platforms and digital ecosystems for the Internet of Everything (IoE).
The updated publication of the Trust Challenges and Opportunities introduces key digital trust concepts, identifies important trends increasing the demand for digital trust capabilities, articulates a digital trust vision and a roadmap of challenges to achieve that vision as expressed by TM Forum members and experts from other industries, governments and academia. It summarizes the trust management landscape and has been expanded to reference related work on trust across other TM Forum work such as customer centricity, digital maturity, business agility, zero-touch and blockchain.
The challenges and opportunities of Monetization are the focus of 2 of the latest assets. TR271 Monetizing Internet of Everything (IoE) guide describes a standardized approach and a monetization template to help members when creating innovative products and defining new monetization models. It includes definitions of monetization models, how to build a monetization model using the template, an outline and examples of typical monetization patterns as well as the examination of key future trends in this area. TR276 Monetizing 5G aims to describe the main business verticals and use cases enabled by 5G technology. This version of the paper is an initial attempt to describe the way 5G ecosystems will be monetized, exploring the Factories of the Future Vertical.
TM Forum has initiated an exploration of blockchain technology including development of a blockchain “sandbox” and member contributions of proposed use cases. The Technical Report, TR279 CSP Use Cases Utilizing Blockchain, describes the use cases developed to date, along with the background information necessary to evaluate them.
Customer Centricity & Analytics
The pressure on CIOs to leverage analytics for business innovation has never been higher. Service providers have been capturing vast quantities of transactional data from their traditional operational support systems (OSS). These systems have been made more robust and scalable through the application of TM Forum’s Information Framework (SID). Unique big data requirements and the need for rapid service provider business insight has driven the need for an enhanced big data dictionary. As service providers research and prioritize their analytics investments, the newly published TM Forum Big Data Analytics Solution Suite includes an update to the Big Data Analytics Big Data Repository (ABDR).
The 360 degree View of a Customer guidebook describes a comprehensive view of the customer to facilitate advanced analysis to gain additional insights about the customer from all angles. It defines useful terminology in alignment with the Business Process Framework (eTOM) and Information Framework (SID). This release of the guidebook reflects today’s needs in relation to the Internet of Everything Experience and includes a focus on the use of analytics, customer sentiment, and inanimate “Things” as users alongside persons being users.
The Customer Experience Implementation Guide (GB962D) is a collection of use cases that represent business challenges and it provides an outline of possible solutions that involve the TM Forum best practices, recommendations and also models like the Business Process Framework (eTOM) and the Information Framework (SID). There are currently 50 use cases that have been published, including 1 new use case in this release relating to mobile phone user’s customer experience and fault locating.
If you have any immediate questions, please email us at [email protected]