Service Providers (SPs) are currently faced with challenging transformations as the communications industry moves to converged services and new players enter the field. Currently, there are a variety of fragmented benchmarking sources available to support SPs, however these in most cases lack a holistic view or are not structured in a way that could provide SPs with reference data that can be relied upon. TM Forum has identified Business Performance Benchmarking as a powerful tool to support Service Providers (SPs) decision making and facilitate transformation. For example, Business Performance Benchmarking supports prioritization of investments by allowing the SPs to estimate and quantify the extent of potential improvements as well as their ROI.
To be useful, service providers need information-–in particular:
- An accurate view of current business performance
- An accurate comparison against the best business performance in the industry
This requires meaningful business benchmarks that measure line of business performance in the context of key operating processes and fiscal measures of a service provider
Establishing relevant benchmarks can be a challenging task. To this end, the Telecom Operations Benchmarking (TOB) Team, which has now changed its name to the Business Metrics Development team, was established to create meaningful business performance metrics. To do so, while making the task manageable, the work done by the team must address the two killer benchmarking challenges:
1. Assure relevancy – high business impact
- The work will address this by using a top down approach
- The work will measure what is important not what is easy to measure
- Ensure technology, market and regulatory evolution is accommodated
2. Ensure “apples to apples”, not “apples to hubcaps” comparisons
- The work will use a process that assures that the same words mean the same thing
Project Sponsor: Keith Willetts, TM Forum Chairman of the Board
Participating Companies: Amdocs, CGI, e*Tezeract, Alcatel-Lucent, Oracle, Microsoft, IBM, OSI