As Telco’s Become Service-Centric, They Need to Think BPM

Business process management (BPM) is a fast growing management practice that many industries have embraced.

IDC predicts the BPM market will grow 20 percent every year through 2010, and Gartner has identified 140 companies claiming to be BPM players—the top 10 of which own 55 percent of the market.

At the top are companies like IBM, which has made BPM announcements involving its optimization servers for WebSphere SOA; Microsoft, which has enhanced Office through workflow optimization; and Oracle, SAP, Adobe, Documentive/EMC, WebMethods, SAP, Tibco and Staffware—not to mention most others active in the ERP, EAI, document management and workflow space.

Despite the fact that a Google search of “business process management” telecom software solutions yielded 1,230,000 hits, many OSS/BSS players do not recognize the term “BPM.”

“Everyone has a different way of defining BPM,” says Ed Shanahan, TMNG’s principal and vice president. “But we define it as a structured discipline that aligns information flow, operational management, and manual and automated systems around a common message of maximizing an enterprise’s effectiveness while minimizing operational costs.”

Regardless of how it’s defined, BPM is becoming a key enabler in retail, manufacturing, financial services and any industry striving to better match supply and demand, as well as manage multiple partnerships.

Of course, the poster child for BPM is Wal-Mart, as its focus on IT investments to enhance BPM enabled it to optimize workflow to the point it has become the world’s most influential reseller.

The concept of running lean and pushing suppliers to do the same may carry over into telecom as the nature of the business changes. Whether there’s a Wal-Mart type of market disruption brewing in telecom remains to be seen.

Cingular, SBC, Verizon, Telecom Italia, Swisscom and TeleDanmark, as well as newer operators like Columbia Mobile, have all focused on business processes. However, telecom is far more dynamic than retail or manufacturing. Its services, customer demands, networks and systems change in a matter of weeks, days or even hours.

Those dynamic changes are difficult to accommodate when IT systems have been around for many decades, such as TIRKS, which some have used for inventory management for perhaps 80 years. Because carriers generally have a very IT- and network-centric view of their businesses, they focus more on enhancing their networks and fixing legacy problems rather than ameliorating processes.

Additionally, operators have grown in numerous ways—ILECs through acquisition over time and CLECs through high-growth booms. In many cases, data integrity was thrown to the wind, so business processes relying on that data are yet to mature. Inflexibility is rampant, and with so many OSS/BSSs, multitudes of stovepipes house vital customer data. That has made coordination across functional areas very difficult for top-to-bottom reengineering and management of business processes.

To change, carriers must think carefully about the role they will have to play down the road. Rather than acting as mere providers of connectivity, there are business models that would enable them to productize their networks for those pushing content or traffic. They can go beyond just offering IP connectivity and looking at the different parameters and measures of the service for which they can charge.

“Today, an operator’s service inventory consist of six to 12 services, most of which have been around for decades. At some point soon, they have to think of the many permutations of content—such as videos, music downloads or games—that will exist. There could be hundreds, if not thousands, of permutations—each with its own [inventory number],” says Grant Lenahan, vice president of Telcordia’s IMS service delivery solutions. “There will be orders of magnitudes more products to catalog, as well as magnitudes more wholesale revenue sharing relationships to manage.” Every permutation might involve the operator, which could collect revenue for selling copyright material over its network, and share in revenues among copyright holders and aggregators.

The possibilities are becoming obvious, when one looks at the fact the video iPod immediately attracted 1 million customers willing to pay $1.99 for a “Desperate Housewives” episode. Given that, “the rating, discounting and settlements have to evolve so they can remit in that fashion,” says Beau Atwater, executive director in the office of the CTO for Telcordia.

He believes the carriers in one way or another are trying to embrace a retail model. “Whether IPTV or ring tones, the concept is still a horizontal model of managing a supply chain,” Atwater says. “And, like the successful retail organizations, investment in IT and processes will be the only way to gain visibility of partners and customers. Those that don’t change operations to that model will go out of business.”

The key, he says, is risk sharing. “It’s risky business, so service providers have to learn to distribute risk among partners rather than bearing it all on their own” Atwater says. “Partners are like suppliers in the supply chain, and operations systems in the vertical stack for fulfillment have to evolve to link up with partners. If you go into a Dell Computer Web site, Dell has visibility into all its partners’ inventory. That’s what operators should aim for.”

“No one has ‘cracked the code’ with top-to-bottom, strategic BPM initiatives,” says Adam Boone, VP of strategic marketing for Syndesis. Most carriers, he says, still go about fixing process problems one by one, or system by system.

Adeptness at matching capacity to changing demands will be essential. To get there, carriers must first understand how customers consume services so resources can be matched to consumption patterns. While retailers employ bar code scanning and inventory tracking to monitor suppliers, merchandise and customers, no such “silver bullet” exists in telecom.

The Many Faces of BPM

Even though BPM is not as hyped in telecom as other industries, its principles are becoming more and more prominent in data integrity management, total quality management, modeling, business process rule engines, enterprise application integration, business intelligence, performance management, total quality management, business activation monitoring and workflow tools.

“Business process in telecom underpins everything service providers do, whether billing, ordering or provisioning—everything from turning up a customer to how to bill for specific services,” says Chris Couch, chief marketing officer with Ace-Comm. “That’s why a bad process in provisioning can start the ball rolling for revenue assurance and fraud problems.”

He says resolution of the most common problems can all be traced to patterns of failure in business processes. In other words, BPM is about identifying discrepancies, monitoring and fixing historical problems to prevent revenue leakage and fraud, and to optimize relationships with suppliers for an enhanced customer experience.

Running “Lean”

If the “lean operator” is to truly exist, operators must break down processes and map them in distinct areas. Mapping process from the marketing campaign to customer acquisition to provisioning and billing makes for a more efficient organization.

That doesn’t mean automation is always the solution to streamlining processes; sometimes it’s just a matter of mapping out the processes and looking for more efficient alternatives.

Some smaller players, for example, may have manual processes for entering data into billing or for provisioning switching with a switch technician on site. “As long as they are still able to focus on end-to-end process, they could still be ahead of the game compared to larger carriers whose processes are embodied in bigger systems,” says Couch.

Despite any advantages the smaller start-ups or niche players have in terms of being able to concentrate on business process rather than massive convergence and integration, they may have another set of challenges down the road, because ultimately they don’t control the lowest layer of the network technology.

In the meantime, both large and small players want to streamline business processes to help optimize utilization of OSS/BSS. Standardized methodologies for doing that are burgeoning.

For example, improvements to the TMF’s eTOM are enabling processes to be broken down into distinct areas for mapping of solutions. Also, NGOSS and the shared information data (SID) model are helping to foster flexibility in integration efforts.

Complementary to that work is the British Standards Institution’s standard for IT service management. Known as the IT Infrastructure Library, ITIL has become the most widely accepted set of best practices for IT service management in most industries.

The maturation of these frameworks has led to a blending of business process and IT management in organizations around the world. That is being noticed, and emerging in OSS/BSS.

For example, HP Consulting’s systems integration unit has launched a process framework that incorporates complementary elements of eTOM and ITIL, as well as intellectual property from more than 10 years of consulting on hundreds of OSS/BSS projects. The Integrated Service Management (ISM) framework is designed to help service providers redefine their business models so that business strategy drives their IT decisions. “Stovepipes have to give way to streamlined and agile systems, which means massive integration and consolidation,” says Michele Campriani, director of operations solutions with HP’s network and service provider business.

“We think that will happen more and more with process ‘engine-centric’ approaches, as opposed to ‘brute force’ engineering that focuses on APIs,” she says. “How quickly an operator can put in an engine for new service creation and execution will depend on business processes around acquisition, provisioning and billing.”

Joining IT best practices with business process optimization could help operators change services and processes without arduous and frequent rewrites of systems every time they build out new capacity or roll out new services—or even enhancements to existing services, such as self-provisioning and self-care.

The latter will be a driver to BPM, as problems that are invisible to customers now will become evident as they provision and configure new services for themselves. As two process streams come together—namely, those that are internally driven and those driven by customer portals—it will be important for operators to have their houses in order.

“When you look at the convergence spurred by IP networks, you see where historical delivery patterns that are compartmentalized in silos will be problematic,” says Andy Fraley, VP of data integrity solutions for Syndesis. “That will spur a drive toward efficiency—not because carriers necessarily want to, but because they have to. That means inefficiencies will have to be addressed across the board.”

However, that requires end-to-end process views, but the huge chasm between marketing and operations makes linking pertinent systems very difficult.

“Carriers really need to embrace SOA as a way to decouple networks and process, which will enable an evolution of metrics from a network- to a process-centric approach,” says Scott Forbes, managing director of Lucent’s network business and consulting.

Under the moniker of service oriented operations (SOO), Lucent is promoting business process management for telecom-specific functions, such as inventory automation and inventory flowback. “As carriers look at non-traditional services, such as VPNs or Ethernet over IP or optical, there will be a need to ‘drive up’ network knowledge about end-customer services to operations systems,” Forbes says. “That will help carriers understand the implications of services on their networks.”

To further understand those implications, carriers must improve communication among process flows.

Decoupling Networks and Process

With SOA, the intent is to publish services and compose them into business flows, so that multiple services can be put into end-to-end business process models.

As carriers work toward SOA, they will increasingly use Web services to create interfaces that address common application requirements.

With all the XML-like languages and maturing integration points, carriers using Web services could be able to connect disparate silos more readily than in the past. WSDL, XML and SOAP are Web services standards used for interoperable platforms to take a function within existing applications or systems and make it available in a standardized way.

“To readily pass information from one process flow to the next, there are several standards that are useful,” says Scott Mackay, VP of solutions for Intec. He cites BPEL (business process extension language), WS-CDL (Web Services Choreography Description Language), and BPQL (business process query language) as mature enough to be used in telecom.

BPEL in particular has gained a lot of momentum for composing multiple synchronous and asynchronous services into collaborative process flows. In fact, all the major platform vendors active in BPM, including Oracle, Microsoft, IBM, SAP, BEA and Sun, are touting BPEL as a “developer friendly” method for deploying business processes in a standard and portable way.

Oracle, which is paying a lot of attention to telecom these days, was recently recognized as a leader in business process management, as it won the BPEL Process Manager Award from the Web Services Journal. “BPEL is an integral part of expediting new product roll-out. As an integral part of our Fusion middleware, it helps service providers interface with existing infrastructure without creating yet another silo,” explains John Rathbone, senior director of Oracle’s communications business unit. As a TMF member active with NGOSS and eTOM, Oracle believes new service roll-out and integration into existing infrastructure will depend on the maturation of SOA and Web services standards.

“We were just approached by an MVNO customer that wanted to avoid getting stuck in a silo approach to IT infrastructure as they evolved,” explains Rathbone. “Their immediate goal was enhancing their cell phone replenishment workflows with retail outlets, but flexible, standards-based interfaces were the long-term goal for everything from activation down to provisioning, to the interfaces up to billing and accounting.”

BPEL and Web Services were a major part of the initiative to streamline third-party logistics. “We had to get traditional financial systems for accounts receivable and general ledger to interoperate with those of the third party, as well as getting inventory of handsets and fulfillment in synch and establishing links back to billing,” says Rathbone. A true understanding of volumes and how they would increase with time were important to the MVNO customer. “That meant modeling the business processes and using standard interfaces for accounting, inventory, fulfillment and billing so they could be agile enough to change according to changing market dynamics down the road,” he says.

Indeed, the goals of flexibility and shortening time to market are pushing carriers to leave the intricacies of the “plumbing” necessary for next-gen services to the Oracles, IBMs, Suns and Microsofts of the world.

"Telcos know telecom, so to build a services-based Web service from scratch makes no sense if it they can get it prepackaged off the shelf," contends Rathbone, who believes carriers can be more adaptable to change.

Indeed, the maturity of SOA, BPEL and adapters for .NET and JCA components have come far enough that components of new services or bundled services can be passed into any system--whether legacy, billing in mainframes, Unix, Sybase or DB2.

"Once flexibility is introduced to your platforms, then you can go on to OSS/BSS through APIs and adapters," says Rathbone.

BPM in the OSS/BSS

It’s not just the major platform vendors who should be focused on easing integration and streamlining processes. That should also be the responsibility of OSS/BSS vendors.

While start-ups and younger companies have the luxury of trying to avoid silos, ILECs already are immersed in them—whether for DSL, Wi-Fi, Ethernet-to-the-home or other broadband technologies.

Since tight integration of OSS/BSS applications will require more than just traditional EAI or data integration initiatives, OSS/BSS will have to interact with BPM in one way or another. Even as carriers streamline processes through BPM, they will still have to embed or integrate BSS infrastructure.

“Right now, activation for siloed services can be convoluted,” Rathbone says. “It can be a mess. But carriers can’t just go out and buy new provisioning and workflow systems. They have to find ways to interface with what they already have.”

Because existing OSS/BSS infrastructure doesn’t lend itself to integration, some back-office and operations vendors are working on opening APIs and built-in business workflow to ease integration and to enable BPM.

Through the aforementioned IMS framework, HP is focusing on combining IT and BPM principles to ease integration pains and streamline business process. “We think modeling and design of processes have to happen even before operators implement a BPM tool,” Campriani says, “so we had to create something to build on process reengineering for OSS,” which she says is often the longest leg of a project. “We are designing and developing processes and information models that we want to marry with platforms so that people, process and technology have a consistent way of interacting with tools and systems.”

“We are enhancing Singl.eView to form links between the conceptual business processes and the actual subsystems and APIs below them,” says Intec’s Mackay. “As with IMS and XML, OSS/BSS must address BPM from a high level. Vendors have to build workflow into their assets, and preintegrate physical and graphical workflow engines in applications.” He is monitoring protocol development so that, as the industry moves ahead with BPM, Intec can extend APIs into other systems.

Syndesis is looking at how to link fulfillment and data integrity management to BPM so that carriers can improve service delivery management and ensure that key processes are synched with service delivery processes.

“To plan out capacity as part of service delivery, service providers’ inventory management systems and fulfillment systems will have to synch back to systems that handle broader planning for resource deployment,” says Fraley at Syndesis. He explains that the fulfillment systems may sit at the center, and combine with data integrity management systems that link to BPM.

“Fulfillment steps are changing in dynamic networks,” Fraley says. “As the fulfillment step is satisfied, the carrier should have a view of how the demand was satisfied, so that surrounding systems can do what they need to do. Interface patterns between fulfillment and other OSS/BSS must change.”

As the pattern of convergence continues, dynamic networks will be created, and carriers will no longer tell the network what circuits will be used for certain services. “Rather, service providers will tell the network the intent of the service, and the network will have the intelligence to use the resources necessary to fulfill that intent,” explains Boone at Syndesis. “The network will then come back with the information about how it went about carrying out that intent.”

Of course, that information has to be dynamically coupled across all the systems to which that info is important. “Assurance systems have to understand how services were satisfied. It’s no longer an off-line inventory function and piece-by-piece activation in networks,” says Fraley, explaining that fulfillment systems have to handle a level of design if the network is to conduct auto-routing. “The network then needs to tell the fulfillment system how the service was satisfied and put that information into assurance to address outages through correlations.”

In that scenario, responses are coming back from the networks, that means the interfacing patterns have to change in OSS/BSS. “When Syndesis and CoManage came together, we were in two different markets, but now they have come together,” says Boone. “Data integrity and data management initiatives will make fulfillment the center point of dynamic networks.”

Telcordia is homing in on the importance of third-party relationships in its solutions. “We look at third-party as a critical growth area to offset the decline in traditional telecom business,” says Telcordia’s Atwater.

For that reason, the IMS portfolio is centered on a retail model. “Right now, IMS vendors and buyers pay little or no attention to operational issues,” Atwater says, “because OSS is not addressed by overarching technology bodies like the 3GPP. Technology is the focus right now, but eventually they have to look at operations.” He professes shock that IMS players aren’t yet focusing on OSS/BSS. “Inevitably, innovation will change how people think of operations,” he says, “and if you can’t provision, bill and assure it, it won’t get very far.”

As more back-office vendors develop broad solutions that are preintegrated to enhance business process management through OSS/BSS, carriers can conquer the challenge of enabling the network to control itself, so that they can focus on optimizing relationships with the most innovative members of their growing supply chain.