On September 29, NMF announced that it has changed its governance structure and adopted the name TeleManagement Forum in an effort to raise awareness of the organization’s activities and to become more efficient. These changes also represent an affirmation on the part of the group of the major technological shifts occurring in the telecommunications industry as traditional wireline networks have begun to migrate towards packet technologies. TMN is still alive, however, as its basic concepts have been accepted relatively well by both vendors and carriers. The TeleManagement forum will continue to promote SMART TMN initiatives and catalyst projects to further industry cooperation on technology development and business processes. The group will also continue to focus more on practical, operational guidelines for systems and processes rather than on specific, rigid technical standards which often cannot keep pace with changing market demands.
According to Elizabeth Adams, Managing Director of NMF and newly appointed CEO of the TeleManagement Forum, the group often encountered resistance simply due to its name. People would often associate Network Management Forum with basic network management concepts, such as fault management, rather than the broader operations management direction NMF promoted. “You need the ability to sell that direction, or it’s not providing any value. And that goes hand in hand with how you’re perceived in the marketplace,” says Adams.
Adams also stresses that the TeleManagement Forum will operate very differently than did NMF: “It’s just not going to work for us to keep churning out our specifications and business agreements if we’re not implementing them. We want to make sure that whatever comes out of the TeleManagement Forum is not only business relevant, but also implementation relevant.” She admits that although NMF was never actually a standards body, it did operate much like one--to its detriment. The group is now focused on acting as an implementation body, promoting on-going development relationships that support staged adoption of new technologies and implementation guidelines rather than squeezing projects into developing, and perhaps inflexible, standards. “It’s recognition that if you hand an inch-thick stack [of paper] across a wall, you’re not going to have much luck getting a vendor to do much with it if you’re not willing to pay for them to custom develop,” explains Adams.
The TeleManagement Forum will also focus on attracting new members from the CLEC community, with plans in place to drive more balanced member participation in the organization’s board of directors. Previously, seats on the board were tied to payment of a high membership fee. Adams says that this often led to large companies holding seats on the board without being very active or making a great contribution. The new system is designed to attract members to the board whose companies are perhaps unable to afford the board of directors fee but who make great personal, intellectual contributions to the group. In addition, the forum will be directed by a new management team made up of Adams; NMF co-founder and senior vice president at TCSI Keith Willets; technical program senior directors; forum marketing director Jim Warner; and two representatives from the member companies invited by Adams. As well, the group has raised its entry criteria for new programs and has trimmed and consolidated some of its existing projects. “You reach a certain size and stability point where it’s time to take the next step and start managing more professionally,” says Adams.
Data networking vendors are also beginning to take an increased interest in the work of the forum. Cisco Systems co-sponsored a “birds of a feather” discussion on internet protocol at the recent TeleManagement World meeting held in Dallas in October. Adams says that Microsoft also has noticed the group and she has had encouraging conversations with their “senior folks.” Apparently, companies such as Microsoft and Cisco, that are still learning the telco business and trying to drive acceptance of their technologies in the telecommunications space have been drawn to the forum’s catalyst projects, which allow them to develop and test technology with traditional telco vendors. Adams says the catalyst projects have been some of the best successes for the forum, which will “encourage companies to use the catalyst opportunity as a way to test all kinds of different technology theory.” For example, the forum has been working with CORBA for quite some time in an effort to test the technology’s suitability for mission critical, high reliability telecom systems. Such efforts reflect a general trend in the industry to adopt more general purpose IT technologies in an effort to drive openness and improved economics over the traditional, proprietary technologies that have dominated telecommunications networks until now.
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