Blog

TM Forum’s Management World, Dublin 2012 – Day 2

The second day of the event (May 23) began, just like the previous one, with a bunch of morning keynotes. There were two presentations:

• By Dato’ Seri Zamzamzairani Mohd Isa, Group CEO at Telekom Malaysia, talking about an amazingly good collaboration between his company and the local government in implementing a complex and strategic project of high-speed broadband at national level. The company received the Operational Excellence Award from TM Forum for the fast delivery of the project (six months ahead of the schedule) and for the automated process flow.
• By David Burton, CTO at NATO C3 Agency, who was quite an unusual guest amongst all the IT/Telco-rooted speakers… As the person in charge of driving coherence across the 28 countries in NATO, developing change roadmaps and liaising with member nations and their industries to support the implementation of Network-Enabled Capabilities, he called for rapid capability delivery.
  Mr. Burton indicated that armed forces nowadays often become early adopters of new technologies rather than catch up the rest. Being proud of the existing cross-industry collaboration, he concluded that without it, instead of reliable “plug and play” devices, soldiers would still need to stick to their old “plug and pray” mantra…

The executive panel discussion after these presentations was mainly about driving innovation through partnership – should Telco companies remain mere platform providers or go beyond that, to become innovation-enablers (based on that platform)? There was a clash of different views on this topic from Google, Voxygen and Microsoft – all striving for the same goal of building effective partner ecosystems, but in their own ways. The favorite quote of the day was: “Telcos must be less telco”!

Notable summit sessions:

• “Reducing Operations Costs and IT Risk Stream: Truly Achieving IT Simplification”, including case studies presented by companies such as Deutsche Telekom and Orange Polska.
• “The Connected Customer Experience Stream: Making Analytics Work for You”, including presentations, executive summaries and panes held by Vodafone, Oracle, AT&T etc.
• “Cable at Management World Stream: Enabling new cable services through Frameworx”, with executive summaries and discussions involving TM Forum, Cable Labs, UPC Broadband, Sandvine etc.

Some of the day’s conclusions:

• Operators from different countries (Deutsche Telekom, France Telecom, TTNET – sub. of Turk Telekom, TIM Brasil) independently agree that TM Forum Frameworx, combined with other industry reference models and good practices (such as ITIL or TOGAF) can be effectively used in order to reduce operations’ costs and IT risk by simplifying the overall Enterprise Architecture. Within their IT Transformation Programmes, they typically use a mix of such public frameworks with the internally developed ones.
• There’s a new variation on the well-known theme of Business Intelligence, called Big Data Analytics. Speakers’ presentations and panel discussions with the audience were trying to answer the question regarding what kind of added value and new communication service offerings may soon arise – especially in the context of transforming enormous amounts of data gathered day by day within the social media into business knowledge that can be monetized by market participants.
• TM Forum Cable Community has recently put a remarkable effort into developing the so-called “Quick Start Packs” (QSP), which are designed to help Multi Service Operators (MSOs) make their business process architectures more agile and flexible in a truly service-oriented manner. QSPs are said to enable fast implementation of new business processes and supporting services, providing some (almost executable!) real-life examples of Frameworx eTOM “in action”.

Wawrzyniec Kowalczyk
www.computaris.com | www.professional-trainings.net

Related posts: