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Transforming to a digital business is more fundamental than absorbing new technologies, it’s also about optimizing the delivery of digital services through business and IT, improving customer experience, partner integration and value, and more.
At TM Forum Live! Digital Disruption in San Jose, the Forum announced the release of Frameworx 14.5, the latest version of its Frameworx suite of standards and best practices. The new suite delivers a host of new tools to help businesses accelerate their transformation and thrive in the digital ecosystem.
The 14 agile projects in this release include delivering Service Agility Blueprints for Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) via Forum’s Zero-touch Orchestration, Operations and Management (ZOOM) project, which aims to map out clear standards for the orchestration and management of virtualized services. The Open Digital program announces the Open Digital Ecosystem Toolkit which includes practical tools to support open digital and Internet of Things (IoT) initiatives. In addition, there are significant enhancements to our Customer Centricity program and the core Frameworx standards
As a member, you can download and make use of all the tools, best practices, standards, APIs and interfaces found in this exciting new release. Adopted by 91% of the world’s largest service providers, TM Forum Frameworx continues to be the most widely used blueprint for effective and efficient business operations. Start using Frameworx 14.5 today!
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Release 14.5 Highlights
The features of Frameworx 14.5 are guided by the Forum’s members and its strategic programs – Agile Business and IT, Open Digital, and Customer Centricity, and focus on three major challenges facing service providers today. Here are the highlights. For the full feature list, see the Current Features webpage.
TM Forum’s Agile Business and IT Program helps service providers and enterprises continuously optimize their IT and business operations. Key features in Frameworx 14.5 that support this program are:
- A set of new Extra Insights eBooks based on TM Forum’s Zero-touch Orchestration and Operation Management (ZOOM) project including NFV: Are you prepared? Operations and procurement readiness identifies the key technical, business, organizational and cultural changes necessary for service providers to successfully procure and deploy virtualized network components.
- Extra Insights – NFV: What does it take to be agile? DevOps transformation framework for the digital ecosystem explores how to transform from a traditional SysOps/NetOps approach to an agile DevOps approach to quickly introduce new services.
- Extras Insights – NFV: Can it be managed? Blueprint for end-to-end management defines the essential requirements for effective management of digital services that span multiple partners’ environments, specifically exploring how to make end-to-end management happen in a hybrid world that includes both current and virtualized components.
- In addition, a comprehensive set of technical reports has been released on a wide range of topics including a compendium of NFV user stories, NFV MANO gap analysis, specifications and interface requirements, exploratory reports on NFV security fabric needs, NFV readiness, impact of end-to-end SLA management, OSS/BSS futures and many more.
TM Forum’s Open Digital Ecosystem Program helps service providers, enterprises and technology suppliers create, build and operate complex, innovative services by developing the right tools, APIs, standards and best practices. Key features in Frameworx 14.5 that support this program are:
- TM Forum and more than 2 dozen enterprises have collaborated as an agile team to assemble the Open Digital Ecosystem Toolkit version 0.1. This beta toolkit is comprised of a number of components including the Digital Services Reference Architecture (DSRA), B2B2X partnering initiative, REST-based management APIs, and end to end use cases.
- An introduction to the Digital Services Reference Architecture (DSRA), the Forum’s proposal to enable richer and yet open, distributed digital collaboration with the essential tools to support increasingly demanding technical and commercial models.
- Extension of the B2B2X Partnering guide, TR211 Business Partnering Guide Touch Points Resource R14.5.0 providing the basis for best practices for the identification of touchpoints between partners in the digital ecosystem.
- Best practices for specifying REST based Management APIs and understanding common patterns across ODE APIs. In addition, this release includes additional Open Digital APIs for customer management, party management, SLA management and more.
- Applied Frameworx for Smart Energy provides utilities with examples of using Frameworx best practices, blueprints, models, APIs and integration to create a scalable set of digital services to address priority use cases.
- Additionally, Applied Frameworx for IoT will be available shortly, providing business canvas templates that support vertical industry user stories.
TM Forum’s Customer Centricity Program recognises that keeping the customer front and center is critical for the success of a digital business. Customer experience, data analytics, metrics and revenue management are all impacted by upcoming additions of M2M services/connected everything and virtualized networks and services. In addition, services that are delivered with partners change the models for CEM and Revenue Management — who owns the customer? Key features in Frameworx 14.5 to address these issues are:
- The new Omni Channel Introductory Guide introduces the key imperatives for omni channel implementation, a definition of the operational functions needed as well as over 30 requirements and mini-use cases defined for evaluating priorities for omni channel projects
- Updates to the Customer Experience Management Solution Suite as well as a new TMF423 CEM Implementation Use Case Template and further user cases.
- Enhancements to the GB979 Big Data Analytics Solution Suite as well as 3 new big data analytics use cases and important privacy risk scoring for user cases are all aimed at helping service providers unleash the power of big data.
- 61 new customer experience management lifecycle metrics have been added, as well as many new dimensions, increasing the depth of coverage of retail outlets, account activation, payment and IVR performance. In addition there are a large number of corrections and consistency improvements, bringing the grand total number of customer experience management metrics to 537.
There were also some significant enhancements to the core Frameworks, including:
- Phase II of the Functional Model of the GB929 Application Framework (TAM) was completed, adding substantially to the number of functions available. The process of developing a set of normalized functional decomposition captured in the Functional Model significantly increases value to service providers.
- Updates to the GB922 Information Framework (SID) include a new set of Test ABEs in the Common, Product, Service, and Resource domains; the final iteration of the Metric model; new updates to the SID Validator; further alignment of the guide books and models.
- Domains have been added to the GB921 Business Process Framework (Etom) to increase its alignment with the other frameworks and making it easier for members to see the cross framework associations. New decomposition rules were added increasing the consistency of the framework, and Fraud processes were added in concert with the Fraud Management Project to expand the areas covered by the Business Process Framework.