Wednesday, February 3, 2010

eTOM and ITIL

It's interesting how two worlds co-existed in the large Telco environments but did not have much interaction... I am talking about IT and Telecom, even from the consulting point of view, we would only deal with IT but never touch the telecom management areas and each side had something tha the other side needed. Lately we see more interaction between the two areas and it is interesting how more advanced IT was in the service support areas with ITIL. Service Desk software are badly needed in the telecom side of the large companies and now ITIL is officially part of eTOM v8, addressing the service support areas. eTOM addresses the entire Telecom enterprise, however, it is remains higher level than ITIL in terms of detail. On the other hand, it gives a good of the Telecom company structure. In smaller telecom companies (and also younger companies) we have done for example provisioning control through service desk in the past and the telecom guys were able to keep the provisioning side organized and simplified processes and their life in general... however, looking at large telecoms, some of them struggle to keep track of the situation with little homegrown applications left and right but given the increase of demand for data networks and managed services now the situation gets more serious and is a critical revenue channel that needs to be optimized.
Shown below are the areas that ITIL v3 addresses (click on the image to enlarge):

Having said that though, people have to realize that they need to share information, centralize the information and manage the processes end-to-end in the Telecom company, and that is where the CTO and CIO roles are very critical in getting this through, especially in ex state owned telecoms where there was a big gap between upper and middle management.
HP is ahead of the competition and has developed ISM, a framework that combines eTOM and ITIL and uses the BTO software in combination with the traditional HP Telecom Management software (e.g. Temip) to address that space, as shown below:


The core of the solution is Service Manager along with the uCMDB for service support and the Parallon SLA Bus has evolved as an enterprise Telecom SLM solution and goes hand-in-hand with the HP BTO products in the complete SLM solution.








The Parallon SLA Bus is integrated with HP Operations Manager, Service Manager and uCMDB to manage complex Telecom SLAs. A couple of screen shots below of the SLA Bus v3.0 coming out in February:





Further reading for eTOM and ITIL:

Paper “TR-143 Building Bridges: ITIL and eTOM by TMForum”, the ITIL incident management processes are part of eTOM framework and the adaptation of these processes is NGOSS compliant.

Also, another reference paper that also includes the configuration management part is

GB921V: Enhanced Telecom Operations Map (eTOM), The Business Process Framework, Release 6.0

Both papers above are available through TMFORUM.