Improving Agility Of OSS Systems: Strategies For Product Life Cycle By BT Dave Milham

Traditionally service providers operated in a regulated market which has been satisfied by a relatively slowly evolving product set - such as telephony and data services. Their focus has been on improving routine operational processes -‘Lead to Cash' and ‘Trouble to Repair' - that lie within the Operations Area of the TeleManagement Forum (TMF) enhanced Telecoms Operation Map (eTOM). These processes are typified by high volumes of similar transactions where the business goals are to improve customer satisfaction through better quality (Right First Time-RFT) and responsiveness (Cycle Time - CT).

Product Life Cycle agility

Software based services Software based services allows new and novel services to be designed and deployed without substantial infrastructure deployment, and to quickly track shifting market and consumer preferences.
New Competitors enabled by de regulation are pressurising margins on traditional products.
Broadband Communications based on IP standards, are dramatically lowering the cost of telecommunications, particularly in the access network, to support multimedia services.
Soft Telcos: Broadband allows service centric Soft Telcos to focus on delivery to focused markets, without needing to invest in physical access infrastructure.
Maturing products Services offered by service providers are maturing, subject to reducing margins, and being substituted by new alternatives.

The key goals are to reduce the time taken to introduce new products and change existing products in response to customer needs. BT refers to this as the ‘Concept to Market' process which can also be applied to how soon to withdraw products and services as part of their normal lifecycle. The automation of processes in the eTOM Strategy Infrastructure and Product Area can be seen as a part of a Concept to Market process.

This has to be achieved through organisational and technological agility, to quickly develop and deploy products out of re-useable capabilities, and data driving the Business Support Systems /Operations Support Systems (BSS/OSS) with these new products.

What is a product?

Products and Solutions

The BT Retail, BT Wholesale, and Openreach product mindset creates an entity which is specified once and delivered in volume. While the majority of BT revenues used to come from a limited product set, today an increasingly diverse set of products, sold in smaller volumes, address specific customers and distinct marketplaces.

The solution mindset generates solutions that are based mostly upon ‘standard' volume products but with some specific customised capabilities which might be for a single customer.

Increasingly the boundary is blurring between these mindset. The challenge is to deliver customer solutions, with their requirement for specialised capabilities, in a repeatable, agile, and cost effective manner.

Stakeholder views and needs

Within a service provider organisation, the stakeholders involved in the product lifecycle, have diverse views on what a product is, and what kind of changes they need to have supported. For example:

Pre-sales Personnel selling solutions need to be able to add capabilities to standard products in a way that is cost effective, repeatable and at a predictable cost. Their primary need of a product is clear specification of customer features, benefits, costs/pricing, and basic ordering information.
Sales Personnel are concerned with the detailed information that needs to be captured in the ordering process, the information to be presented on web sites and web based ordering systems, compatibility and business rule constraints, and detailed price plans. Telcos are not Amazons. To sell and support a service and track and bill customer usage of product is unfortunately more complex.
Product managers are concerned with the way the product is presented externally, the process and costs of creating and maintaining the product, sales volumes, capital commitments and profitability forecasts.
Solution Architects are concerned with the detailed technical and operational data, systems, and processes that comprise Lead to Cash and Trouble to Resolve processes.

Any product definition has to address the diverse range of stakeholder information perspectives covering the full product lifecycle. The product data that is needed is therefore complex to manage.

Technology impacts on products

The use of Commercial Off the Shelf(COTS) BSS /OSS products for Ordering, Customer Relationship Management, Activation and Billing presents new technical challenges for product management:

No common Industry Product model. Each COTS vendor has developed their view of a product model from their specific functional perspective. And none of them align with the product model used in Telcos.
Lack of an industry End to end Product Lifecycle: COTS Products restrict the data model to their functional area and provide local capabilities to update and maintain their databases. There is no industry API standard for automating the synchronisation and update of these databases.
Performance and non functional aspects The volume of data needed to support products is substantial and it is infeasible to hold all the product data in a single database to which all applications direct their queries; e.g. Web Based ordering response time requirements preclude access to a single back end database.
Divergence of Process Traditionally the implementation of OSS for different product has been done in silos. Customer demand for converged products means legacy product silos have to be replaced with a single integrated OSS/BSS.

Addressing Product Challenges

Reducing time for product introduction requires a fundamental rethink about the product lifecycle process, and the way it is realised by people, and operations support systems.

BT established a programme in 2003 to restructure its operations systems [1] into a number of functional platforms. The Portfolio Management Programme was established to improve the solutions used to manage products and the portfolio and addressed:

A common product lifecycle process for all products.
A product /programme management tool that manages all stages of the product lifecycle, ensuring the correct and timely execution of all the necessary process and information collation steps.
Development of a standard Product Master File that is used as the reference from which all native BSS/COTS data models are derived using a BT developed Software Development Tool kit.

This approach is starting to pay off with initial classes of product families supported, but more effort is still needed as OSS/BSS continues to evolve and more and more products are reworked to use the new approach.

Leveraging the industry

The emergence of new services based upon service components models: IMS, Software Deployment Platforms, Web Mash-ups, and IPTV require further enhancements to product lifecycle solutions.

The TMF initiated the Service Deployment Framework (SDF) team to investigate a number of product exemplars and to create a SDF Framework to realise products from re-useable services, together with the management capabilities to manage these composed services.

The TMF requirements analysis work is ongoing but a number of essential SDF architectural features have been identified:

Product Lifecycle Model: A standardised model is needed to ensure that all products, services, and resources used to realise the product follow a common lifecycle model. Standardised Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) are needed to allow development tool kits used in the different stages of the lifecycle, to interact with the end to end process, and the catalogues used to manage the Lifecycle Process.
Metadata Model: Metadata definitions must be defined as the reference base for all specifications of products, services and resources. This facilitates consistent and compatible specifications that can be readily combined.
Active Catalogues: In the new product lifecycle paradigm there are many products, services and resources being developed concurrently. Instances of their specifications (based on the Metadata Models) need to be available in near real time, with all the dependencies maintained. This requires evolution from the Product Master File approach with its relatively static distribution mechanism; to active catalogue to store these specifications. The catalogues signal changes amongst themselves to keep the relationships between products, services and resources in step; whilst allowing new service and product compositions to be created. Catalogues need to be distributed within an organisation, and work across supply chain boundaries e.g. BT Retail and BT Wholesale.

The Active Catalogue concept was investigated by the TMF PSA Catalyst project (TeleManagement World Nice 2007) by BT, Cable and Wireless, TeliaSonera, Qinetiq, Axiom, Atos-Origin, Convergsys, Huawei, Oracle, & Tibco. The Active Catalogue interface has been published as the PSA v0.9 http://sourceforge.net/projects/psa-api

Quo Vadis?

The industry needs to create agreements on the specifications and APIs to create the SDF architecture for Product Lifecycle, Metadata and Active Catalogues.
Service Providers need to work with new partners on industry strength solutions, and research topics to address current shortcomings.

[1] New revenues early, whilst delivering reductions in system costs through consolidation – BT's SOA case study George Glass TMF TeleManagement World Dallas 2006.

Dave Milham's role is driving OSS Architecture and Innovation within the BT Group and its customers through BT Telconsult and Global Services. He manages BT's OSS contributions to the TMForum, and other standards groups. He co-chairs the TMF Service Delivery Framework and MTOP Program Planning Council teams; and is a member of the TMF Technical Committee, Technical Program Committee, Service Provider Leadership Council, and other teams. He graduated from Imperial College and Essex University , is a Member of the IET, and a TMForum Distinguished Fellow.

Jim Hutton

Jim Hutton's recent role was to drive Portfolio Architecture across BT Design and portfolio and product related business areas. Jim is now actively involved in improving common design techniques in C2M and L2C areas for BT Retail.