telecom services, and we propose examples and models for each view. ... congestion/problems, tools to isolate and repair faults, tools to see ... supporting these business processes; ... instance phone call, messages, or audiovisual content.
Applying Enterprise Architecture Principles to Telco Services Emmanuel Bertin, Simon Bécot, Rémi Nedelec Orange Labs 42 rue des Coutures BP 6243 14066 Caen, France {emmanuel.bertin|simon.becot|remi.nedelec}@orange-ftgroup.com
Abstract—We study in this article how to apply Enterprise Architecture (EA) methods to enhance the delivery and the consumption of telecom services. After having discussed the use of EA in the telecom field, we investigate the various views of telecom services, and we propose examples and models for each view. Keywords: Srevice Architecture, Service Platform, Service Delivery Framework, Enterprise Architecture
I.
INTRODUCTION
The growing number of innovative services, the convergence of Internet, Fixed and Mobile offers as well as Telco's expansion worldwide considerably increase the complexity of producing and deploying service platforms. To rationalize, accelerate and simplify these processes, France Telecom Orange Labs has decided to apply Enterprise Architecture (EA) principles, more commonly used in the IT field, to its Telco service Platforms. This is supposed to provide support to projects and to rationalize platforms and enablers.
If Enterprise Architecture is now widely used in IT domains, the classification and mapping of Service platforms are still emerging right now. This paper gives an overview of the approach proposed by Orange Labs to solve these problems. II.
The main actor involved in Telco's Enterprise Architecture is the Tele Management Forum (http://www.tmforum.org/). TMF is a consortium grouping Telcos, network carriers and service provider that focus on the management of telecom services. The management system of a telecommunication operator is mainly about data handling, storage and operations according to that data (operations such as billing, activation configuration and so forth). Figure 1 shows the operational part of the telecommunication management as defined by the enhanced Telecom Operation Map [1].
Enterprise Architecture (or Urbanism) is based on an analogy with urban planning in towns and cities: an efficiently organized town for instance does not necessarily need two stadiums, running water should be available everywhere, roads should be in proper condition, communications should be thought in a global way. Each quarter has its own issues, but a global view of the town, respecting the global development strategy, should impose rules. In the same way, for IT, compatible technologies should be used; only one authentication systems is supported, reference repositories must be shared, etc. If each project has a clear vision of its own needs, it does not necessarily have a global vision of all the applications/services of the group, nor of how to use them. Enterprise Architecture provides this global, crosscutting view. Main objectives of the Enterprise Architecture are to •
Reduce the time needed to design and develop new services
•
Facilitate and promote their reuse
•
Cut down on platforms’ operational costs
ENTERPRISE ARCHITECTURE FOR SERVICE MANAGEMENT
Figure 1. eTOM Operations
In this figure the vertical blocks represent the processes of Fulfillment, Assurance and Billing: •
Fulfillment ability to take an order and setup the service includes: installation, provisioning, and activation, testing of the service.
•
Assurance ability to guarantee a certain level of service includes: monitoring of
congestion/problems, tools to isolate and repair faults, tools to see which customers are affected. •
Billing ability to generate an invoice for service rendered and answer to customer inquiries includes: call center, billing systems.
•
Operations Support and readiness ability to support the 3 previous processes (e.g. shiping).
The horizontal layers represent the functional parts that perform: the customer relationship management, the service management & operations, the resource management & operations and the Supplier/Partner management. The TMF has so specified a whole framework of processes for fulfillment, assurance and billing of services. However, these standards focus on the internal activities of an enterprise for providing services; e.g. service design, service delivery, and service support. They do not cover the core value of a service as seen by its user: the TMF does not specify how a service is used and what it is used for. III.
ENTERPRISE ARCHITECTURE FOR SERVICE USAGE
The EA frameworks (like Zachman [2]) define various points of view (business, system, technology, etc.) in order to take into account all the aspects of these strategic objectives. This paper relies on the four classic EA views (defined for instance in [3]): •
the business view, that contains the business processes and their relationships;
•
the functional view, which describes the functions supporting these business processes;
•
the technical view, that contains the recommended software and hardware;
•
and the applicative view, which describes how functions are implemented by logical components and deployed on technical nodes.
functions/applications/infrastructures. We have named city map the set of these stable elements and the relationship between them. Let us now study how to identify these stable elements. IV.
RESULTS AND EXAMPLES
A. Business View The usage of telecom services is a service relationship between a service consumer and a service provider. It is usually not modeled as business processes. Nevertheless, we can identify concepts and activities that are manipulated by the stakeholders of a telecom service (e.g. operator, service provider, users, and third-parties). These concepts are for instance phone call, messages, or audiovisual content. Typical telecom services enable the stakeholder to perform activities with these concepts. A messaging service is for example designed to compose messages and deliver them. A Video-OnDemand service enables to acquire audiovisual contents, to prepare and catalog them, and finally to select one content and to diffuse it. All these concepts and activities can be formalized, for instance with UML activity diagrams, and constitute a business view for telecom services. This part will be detailed in the final version. B. Functional View In the IT field, the functional view is usually divided in •
a front-office area, that contains the various communication channels
•
a back-office area, which includes one quarter per main business of the enterprise
•
a data area with data pools
This classification is not directly suitable for telecom services. Telecom services are end-to-end services. End-devices are often dedicated to a type of service (e.g. a phone for telephony). Even web-based services own their own frontoffice (i.e. their presentation layer). Moreover, the communication between services is not achieved by the sharing of a common data pools, but with the SOA principles, where each service is responsible of its data. Concerning the telecom operators, we propose to distinguish between 10 areas, which support the previously described business view.
Figure 2. EA views and their relationships.
The main issue, but also the main benefit of enterprise architecture is to identify on each view stable elements that depict the strategy of a telecom operator. These elements can then be used inside the enterprise as a reference to communicate to each project a clear vision of the
This part will be detailed in the final version. device
business mediation
commerce
D. Applicative View The applicative view detail how functional areas should be implemented on technical areas. For instance, concerning the live communications functional area, some key organic components are the User Equipments, the S-CSCF and the HSS, and the telephony AS. Each component offers interfaces that implement functions from the functional view.
messaging
security & rights
live communications
geographical information
personal & community info.
multimedia contents
user characteristics
This part will be detailed in the final version. V.
Figure 3. Functional areas
These areas will be detailed in the final version C. Technical View Telecom services are usually supported by equipments that should conform to standards. These standards might be explicitly defined, like the ITU-T, ETSI or IETF ones, or less explicitly, like the SOA paradigm or the 3-tier architectural framework. These various standards can be positioned to form a global technical view. This lead us to define technical areas that describes the technical framework of an operator.
LESSONS LEARNED
Since a few years, Orange Labs has investigated Enterprise Architecture for Service Platforms. A number of challenges have already been solved. The first one has consisted in building a common framework for service architectures. This frame ensures synergy and coherence between them. A second challenge has been the communication: a methodology has to be understood to be accepted. Finally, global governance is a must to ensure the sustainability and the relevance of this framework. Specific studies in the company’s key areas will allow us to identify new needs and new, reusable components early on. Lastly, we plan to go further in creating tools to assist service architects, and in interfacing with reference repositories. When these different aspects are covered, it is possible to apply this methodology widely in the Telco services world. SOME MAJOR REFERENCES
User terminals Home network Network and service control
Fixed or mobile acces (ADSL, fibre, Wifi, 3G…)
Figure 4. Technical areas
[1]
Communication bus
Service delivery platforms
[2] [3]
TMF Forum, "enhanced Telecom Operations Map (eTOM)", GB921 and addenda, v7.1, Jan 2007 Zachman, J.A., "A Framework for Information Systems Architecture", IBM Systems Journal 26, No. 3, 1987, pp. 276-292 Longépé, C., "The Enterprise Architecture IT project – The Urbanisation paradigm", Kogan Page, 2003.
