In addition to member initiated projects, from time-time the Board of Directors initiates programs to ensure that the organization meets it strategic plan. There are a number of these initiatives underway that will have far reaching effects on the TM Forum.
Transformation and convergence of the market for supplying digital services has led communications service providers and multi-service cable operators (MSO’s) to accelerate their focus on 3 imperatives: reducing operating costs dramatically; reduce time-market and order-cash for new services and improving their customer’s experience. The Forum Board initiatives are aimed
supporting these drivers.
Read more about the TM Forum Board Initiatives:
Read the TM Forum Strategic Plan
Managing services across complex value chains - the Value Chains Initiative
New services, such as IPTV or mobile TV involve many more players to deliver the service than service providers have traditionally dealt with for communications services. The lengthening value chain from content originator to the user device has the potential to dramatically increase operating complexity and cost while also potentially delivering a poorer customer experience. The Forum is helping its members to take ‘friction’ out of the value chain by providing range of standard trading interfaces to allow business processes for functions such as managing payments, resolving customer problems and passing contractual information to move seamlessly and automatically between the various value chain partners. More on the Value Chains Initiative.
Much of this work is being pioneered via the Forum’s groundbreaking Content Encounter. Content Encounter is a working set of technologies brought together by a consortium of TM Forum members to prototype how innovative, content based, services can be efficiently and effectively enabled and managed. This new approach to driving standards development from practical and leading edge work builds on the Forum’s highly successful Catalyst Program. Content Encounter can be seen and interacted with at the Forum’s Management World series of events. More on Content Encounter
A major objective of the Forum is to build strong working relationships with players such as content aggregators, cable and media companies, web companies and consumer electronics companies is as value chains lengthen. The New Sectors initiative is a proactive program, tightly linked to Content Encounter and the Value Chains Initiative and reaching out to many companies beyond the Forum’s traditional communications membership. More on Cable/ MSO initiatives More on device consumer electronics initiatives
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Revenue Management Initiative
As service providers enter ever more brutally competitive markets, introducing new approaches such as advertising supported services and innovative payment options such as billing purchases to your mobile phone bill became increasing important. At the same time, revenue management ‘behind the scenes’ (such as tighter revenue assurance) becomes an increasingly important weapon in the battle for competitiveness. And when customers are kings, they will soon migrate to another supplier if their experience with a provider is less than they expect. Over the past months, the Forum has incorporated two other industry consortia focussed on revenue management and customer care issues – the GBA and IPDR. This gives us an excellent springboard for our Revenue Management Initiative. Several major activities are underway with this initiative including a Billing Performance Benchmarking Survey and extending the Forum’s Business Process Framework (eTOM) to be much richer in the revenue management area and adding a full Revenue and Customer Experience Summit to the forthcoming Management World Orlando in November 2008. More on the Revenue Management Initiative. More on Management World Orlando 2008.
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Major Transformation Programs Initiative
Billions of dollars are now being invested by communications service providers to transform their infrastructure, product portfolios, business models and business processes. Not all of these will succeed and there will be a great deal of learnt along the way. The Forum’s position as a consortium of over 700 member companies in 75 countries gives us the unique opportunity to share best practices, information and ideas to de-risk these major transformation programs. The Forum’s Transformation initiative is designed to allow players around the world to share information widely in different communities of interest. Much of the Forum’s standards and collaborative work is also a strong underpinning for investment in business process re-engineering and back-office systems.
At the heart of the Transformation Initiative is the Transformation Resource Center. This is a new unit within the Forum focussed on providing timely and high quality industry research relating to transformation - a wide spectrum ranging from new business models, through new services commentary; new systems technologies and approaches and new business process thinking. Research information will be sourced from members; through our Benchmarking Program; from specialist 3rd party research companies and the Forum’s own in-house industry research team. More on Transformation Resource Center.
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Upgrading our core frameworks - the Blueprint Initiative
The collaboration work of the Forum has and continues to generate a major body of work relating the management of communications services. As service portfolios evolve to embrace information and entertainment services, many more players in the value chain are using the Forum’s work. In order to be as relevant to the next few years as it has been in the past, the Board has launched an initiative to enhance and upgrade our core industry frameworks and standards. This initiative aims to produce a well integrated Business Transformation Blueprint that lays out all of the key business process, information and systems core architecture required by any company operating in the service value chain. Based on and compatible with our current frameworks and standards such as the Information Framework (SID), the Applications Framework (TAM), the Business Process Framework (eTOM) and our library of interfaces Prosspero.
The Blueprint will have a common style between its various component documents; focus more heavily than today on user and implementation issues, align with major industry standards such as Service Oriented Architectures and ITIL. More on the Business Transformation Blueprint
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Changing the way the Forum’s Collaboration program works - the Speed initiative
As the market evolves, so must the Forum. We have a good track record of expanding and evolving our focus as an industry body as the market has evolved. So too, must our collaboration programs and particularly the processes we use to develop and support our technical work. In the past our collaborative programs have been based on small teams of experts focussed on the production of very high quality standards that will stand the test of time. As we move forward, several other important needs are arising. Standards need to be very timely and well geared to the user and market uptake. And not just standards, equally important are supporting tools, productivity aids and access to useful information by designers and developers.
We are embarking on a major overhaul of our collaboration processes to speed up the time it takes to develop new work; make it simpler to update and enhance collaborative work and make it more accessible and usable by communities of users in the field. This initiative involves investing in new, enhanced collaboration tools; moving collaborative work into web based communities; using open tools such as wikis and evolving a number of levels of maturity of standards so that work is available in a very timely fashion but quality and stability are not compromised. More on this
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