THE INTERNET AS SOURCE OF EXPECTATIONS

THE INTERNET AS SOURCE OF EXPECTATIONS: BUSINESSES PROCESSES REQUIRED Rui L. Aguiar1, José Luís Oliveira1, A. Richardson2, Declan O’Sullivan3 1

Universidade de Aveiro, DET, P-3810 Aveiro, {[email protected], [email protected]} 2 Telemanagement Forum {[email protected]} 3 IONA Technologies, Dublin {[email protected]}

ABSTRACT This paper presents new types of services being envisaged to the Internet, as an answer to corporations’ requests. These services include access, transport and interoperation services, besides more traditional value added services. For widespread usage of these new services, besides technical developments under way, a restructuring of business processes is required for new service providers. This business orientation will accelerate the implementation of new services and ease inter-provider cooperation. Finally this approach may lead to future integration of enterprise and telecom methodologies. 1.

INTRODUCTION: THE CORPORATION AND THE INTERNET

The seamless ability of the Intranet to provide (until now) some form of support to increasingly complex network application requirements has led to great expectations in our society. Corporations seem to expect that Internet will be so powerful as their own internal Intranets; their core information network should be based in the "Internet". Due to these expectations, Public Network Operators (PNO) anticipate the Internet to become their major traffic generator (data traffic is now larger than voice); Internet Service Providers (SP) expect the Internet to allow them to compete in a global deregulated telecommunications market [1]; users expect the magic key, which will open the hyped "Information Highway" door. At this moment, the Internet is widely used for supporting asynchronous communications (such as email) and remote information access (e.g. WWW and file transfer). Some services have been developed upon these basic characteristics, providing the means for a still incipient electronic commerce (but with estimated values of US$ 48 billion in the USA alone, in 1998 [2]). Security, reliability and lack of support for advanced services are usual problems pointed to the present network [3]. However, even in this somewhat-limited environment, a whole range of corporations are deeply engaged in exploiting some kinds of advanced services on the net: radio diffusion, telephony, voice conferencing, video transmission. More common services such as database access, customer service, and point-of-sale, are now so widespread to become of mandatory implementation in almost every major business - although sometimes without a clearly defined business plan or strategy. To many companies, its Internet presence is for now a liability; nevertheless some have already successfully adapted to this new media, and achieved major business sizes (e.g. Amazon, Inc). New strategies for exploiting Internet for business have been put in place in the last years, such as the usage of portals as a media for promoting business, free network access for residential users, or free PC distribution for conditioned access through virtual shops. This situation is further more entangled by the continuous development of Intranets: many companies look now at “internet technology” as a key factor in their internal information-flow. The Intranet became the IP-based support for the company Information System. Developments of the physical network in the intranet (such as structured cabling, PC-based fax, Fast Ethernet, ATM and Gigabit Ethernet) associated with newer applications (such as distributed database systems and groupware) have created a distorted image in the average corporate user: that the “internet” (and not its “intranet”) can actively support the whole communication flow required by the company. As multimedia services seem to appear based on IP technology, corporations ask themselves what advantage they could exploit from these, and if they could have a whole IP-based information structure. This would provide an integrated working environment for the company, from the manufacturing to the management levels. This ambition seems to be achievable (in some way) in the company intranet, with advanced communication technologies running IP, and as Telecom and Information Technology (IT) integration becomes a major trend. Will these expectations be fulfilled in the incoming years in the world-wide Internet? The key technological issues impairing the achievement of an universal IP-based information society, however incipient, seem to be mostly in an initial implementation stage. The issue of supporting Quality of Service (QoS)

over the Internet is probably the major pending question under development at this stage. Its importance is paramount, as many of the new business perspectives for the Internet do require the network to be able to grant some transport assurances. Furthermore, from the ISP point of view, the introduction of QoS in the network will open new business opportunities by itself, boosting operator profits and financing further network increases [3]. The deregulation of the telecommunications market, in countries such us the EU, is yet another force to the emergence of new providers, new infrastructures, and new services [4]. This paper will discuss some of the new advanced services that can be exploited in the telecommunication market in section 2. Implementation and control problems that hinder future growth of these services are then highlighted in section 3. These are fundamentally concerned with management strategies and the economic issues surrounding the appearance of a diversity of new cooperative service providers in the Internet. Section 4 concludes with a possible expansion of this scenario to a future merging of the enterprise and telecommunication methodologies. 2.

NEW SERVICES IN THE INTERNET = NEW SERVICE PROVIDERS

The Internet is providing (trying to at least) a new set of technological solutions that helps to manage network bandwidth [5] in order to provide different levels of QoS (Figure 1). The potentialities being envisaged to the Internet with these recent developments will clearly change the Internet business, and the operators in this market. We can group these businesses types around four different clusters. At this moment, several Internetoriented businesses (with different degrees of maturity) can already be placed in some of these categories. QoS

Integrated Services (Per-flow Resource reservation)

Differentiated Services (Prioritization & Aggregation)

Best Effort Services

Time

Figure 1 - The evolution of QoS approaches on the Internet. Type 1 - Internet Transport Services New types of transport services will inevitable appear, bringing the notion of QoS into IP service providers [6]. According to current differentiate services proposals, one can cluster these new services around three main types: •

Quantitative QoS Transport Services - these services characterize themselves by a Service Level Agreement (SLA) where a minimum QoS is assured to the customer. Example: the Virtual Leased Line (VLL) service [7], where the ISP provides a virtual connection line between two sites.

•

Relative QoS Transport Services - These services characterize themselves by providing the customer with a relative assurance regarding its own traffic in every situation. Example: the Olympic service [7], where the traffic is classified in three different classes, with different drop probabilities in case of network congestion.

•

Variable QoS Transport Services - These services present a variable QoS that will depend on characteristics (or requests) of the customer traffic. The customer will be able to request/change QoS parameters for their packets, according to its own needs. Example: “Pay-per-Request”, where the customer requests (and pays for) the type of QoS it requires from the network [7].

Many more variants are possible, according to market demand, tariff policies, and management flexibility in the ISP network. For instance, “time-based variable tariffs” (where the cost changes with a time schedule), and “time-based variable bandwidths” (where the available connection changes with the time of day) can be applied to most services described above, with complex management functions. Time-based variable tariffs will need to register the traffic being processed, and calculate total costs in function of the time of the day. Time-based

variable bandwidths will allow different QoS according to the time of the day. Simple time-based and amountof-traffic-depended services can already be found today, with proper management software [8]. All the services above can be used to introduce QoS in the Internet; this is independent of the type of traffic being carried by the network, and will potentiate the emergence of new services, especially in the multimedia arena. Although these services should be independent of the type of traffic being transported, although there will be quite different end-user perceptions on the QoS according to the type of data being transported in these network services. Thus it is natural that in a competitive telecommunications world, different operators may specialize in the provision of specific services. From an economical perspective these new QoS-dependent services will redefine the way of doing business today in the IP market. While current services are yet largely based upon the infrastructure maintenance the arrival of new and unforeseeable number of equipments, services and users will raise different and heterogeneous commercial strategies that imply the construction of powerful business models. Type 2 - IP Access Services Physical access to IP services will be provided by specific operators, where cable and wireless operators will have an increasing larger importance. These operators will diversify themselves by the binomial cost/service being provided. As such, traditional low speed PSTN network access will see its cost continuously decreasing (until free access will be common), while wireless and high speed accesses will effectively charge for the connection. Furthermore, the nature of the access business will certainly change – at least for what IP access is concerned. Issues as reliability and customer support will have increasing importance. Furthermore, the existence of virtual hosting and home networks (where the ISP supports the connection of a set of computers in the user’s home) may introduce another aspect on this business. Supplying these access services requires in many cases more complex control functions. These are actually services being provided to the customer, and can be associated with the complex tasks related with the IP transport services above (for issues such as optimization of resources and customized control of access to QoS services). Many customers may prefer to implement these functions themselves, in their own equipment, either due to security considerations, or due to flexibility of internal traffic control. Nevertheless, other customers will prefer to have these issues bundled in their Internet access packet, introducing another front on the IP Access services market. Type 3: PSTN Interoperation Services A very promising area for new services and new service providers is the field of interoperation with the PSTN. This interoperation potentiates several new services [9]. Even without QoS support in the network, fax providers are already operating in the network at present, with extremely low rates (e.g., you may fax your own page free of charge from the Internet with the extra overhead of sending also an extra marketing page), and some voice over IP products can be found. As PSTN/Internet interoperation becomes widespread in the Internet, PNOs may provide a new set of services, supporting fax transmission from the Internet to the PSTN, voice calls between both networks, and other types of services (e.g. mixed Internet/PSTN voice conferences). At this moment, several of these services already exist. Current typical examples are the Short Message Service servers available in the net, which allow a network user (with a Web access) to send a message to a cellular telephone supporting these Message Services, and the Paging services, which page the user when an email message has arrived to its mailbox. However, the widespread usage of these services across the Internet will create more complex issues for these services, as their potentialities increase. For instance, with a simple voice call service (already available), where a voice call is placed through the Internet until a gateway near the receiver location, the situation will change from (the now existing) locally available gateway, to a (in the future) widespread set of gateways that may cooperate. This increased dimension will increase its usage and applicability, and either ISPs or PNOs are bound to exploit these new types of services. Naturally, market demand will define the interoperation services that will become successful. Type 4: Value Added Services These services are the most common presently in the Internet, and are the business force behind its development. Activities such as Point-of-Sale, remote call-center, web hosting, virtual shopping, database access, etc., are already present in the WWW. Some of these services act over the media itself (example: email hosting), but most of them are concerned with old commercial activities now exploiting this new media for marketing, distribution or sales [4]. Being more traditional, we will not delve much over these services – but a reference

should be made that they will be nevertheless consumers of other IP services, and thus a client-provider relationship will always exist here. Example: A Complex Scenario As an example, we can imagine a complex scenario with a QoS data network providing both voice services and PSTN/Internet interoperation services to special clients [7]. Network structure to provide these services is concisely presented in Figure 2. In this figure, we also present a possible application of this network, with a simple phone call communication. John wants to call from his office to Suzy (connection A). There are two ways of establishing this connection, one through the regular PSTN (connection B) and the other through the QoSenhanced data network (connection C). Due to the receiver location, price structures are such that the intelligent PABX in John’s company decides to use the C connection. For doing that, it first issues a call to the PSTN/Internet internetwork, trying to figure what should be the phone gateway to use near Suzy’s phone. There is no need to resort to a specific phone gateway in John’s location, as its company PABX already includes an Internet gateway. After determining the far-end gateway, it asks for a “Multimedia Interactive Service” service (between his location and that gateway) to the entity responsible by managing all Service Level Agreements (SLA) inside the data network, usually known as the Bandwidth Broker. It will accept his request (if possible), define the proper technical parameter in order to fulfill this new SLA, and adjust the data network equipment in order to provide the requested service. The PABX will then establish the connection between John and the network gateway, and, from there, reach Suzy through the POTS network. (Note: this target scenario is still some years away, as technical issues surrounding this environment are still under development). Our key interest in this scenario is just looking to what operators may be involved in these operations. John will have an IP Access service; there will be one (at least) IP transport service (maybe provided by another operator), an identification service (figuring out what would be the best gateway for the IP phone connection), a PSTN interworking operator (controlling the gateway) and a PSTN operator (connecting the phone call until Suzy’s home). The situation could easily be more complex, with the interworking of several service providers. This brings a new complexity layer to the problem, concerning management, billing, and auditing: all the providers would have to cooperate to establish a real service for the user, and ideally John’s PABX would be able to evaluate all these factors before placing the call.

PSTN Suzy

A

Public Switch

B

John

Gateway

C Public Switch

PBX with Internet Gateway

BR

Internet

BB

Gateway data

Figure 2 - A QoS-enabled data network with PSTN interworking.

3.

BUSINESS PROCESS MODELING

In today’s ever increasingly competitive Telecommunications environment, it is essential that these Service Providers (SPs) operate as efficiently and price-competitively as possible [10]. In the scenario depicted above it is not acceptable for old usage and charging methods such as permanent reserved bandwidth to be used still. This

places the complexity in the way in which the SP’s Operational Support Systems (OSSs) or Management Systems are structured. Not only is it important that each individual OSS be efficient, but it also becomes increasingly crucial that these systems be linked together in an appropriate fashion. When making such judgments it is also essential that these systems provide well defined support for the business processes which drive the SP’s organization: in fact the complexity of the relationships that will appear between different service providers will force this to be so. Coupled with the new environment pressures, which are forcing the business process approach, are other commercial pressures that require a reduction in “uniqueness” in the way in which a SP does business. As the widespread usage of a common technology is one of the key forces behind Internet development, it would be strange if business methodologies would impair SP’s competitiveness. Gone are the days when an SP could build their environment completely in their own fashion. It is equally unrealistic for a SP to solely look inwardly when developing their business strategy. As we depicted above, it is increasingly the case that successful SPs must be able to work co-operatively with other SPs as and when business needs dictate (this is a trend further promoted by the continuous expansion of companies into new markets and the current merger and acquisition strategies). After solving technical aspects, co-operation between SPs largely comes down to alignment of business processes [10]. Thus the more standardized these become, the easier it is for the SP to follow business processes implementations as a route to greater business opportunities. This reasoning does not need to go down to the minutia of business process definition, or indeed concern processes that are solely internal to the SP’s environment. But where points of contact with other SPs can be anticipated, it increasingly makes sense to develop these business processes in a standardized, open, format. Essentially there are four major reasons why an SP might consider incorporating open business process models into their framework, as has been clear from TeleManagement Forum work on these issues [11]: • Buy, not make, possibilities for OSS solutions (decreasing time to market of new services, e.g.) • Co-operation with other SPs (including acquisition situations) • Support of interactions between the customer and SP (where this customer may be another SP by itself) • Regulatory situations – where the regulator may use business concerns to open up the market place In this context is important to understand the context within which these BPM will be used. Essentially a simple description of the SP environment, the major participants and their relationships is required. The simple Business Reference Model shown in Figure 3 illustrates this, identifying the principal players and points of contact. S e r v ic e P r o v id e r C u s to m e r

In te r n a l P r o c e s s e s E .g . S e r v ic e a n d N e tw o rk M g m t

S u p p lie r s

O t h e r P r o v id e r s / O p e ra to rs

T h ir d p a r t y A p p lic a t io n s V en d ors

E . g . E le m e n t M g m t S y s t e m s o r N e tw o r k E q u ip m e n t

Source: TMF. Ref 11

Figure 3: The Business Reference Model

Wide ranges of management process automation opportunities exist among the business roles and relationships shown above, which include the SLA we mentioned in the example discussed on the last section. Each opportunity has a specific business objective that will dictate the level and type of management information to be exchanged and the robustness required of the management interface. In addition, if Service Providers wish to benefit from the ability to procure lower cost software from applications vendors, there are benefits in agreeing some standard internal interfaces and functions for widely implemented management capabilities. All of these process interfaces are part of the ‘management value chain’ from the Customer, through the Service Management to Network Management and subsequently to the externally sourced suppliers’ equipment, which supports the communications service. This chain may also include other Service Providers (or Network Operators) in delivering the end-to-end service.

The interfaces to Suppliers and other Provider/Operators are external. These are initially ‘procurement’ interfaces, but after deployment become much more a part of the internal operational management processes., as end-to-end services (such as the simple phone talk of our example) may require cooperation between SP. Thus the suppliers of these products or services need to ensure that their management systems directly support the Service Provider’s internal business processes to ensure the most efficient service delivery. There are therefore potential benefits to all by agreeing upon an open set of processes, and information flows. For the Service Provider it enlarges the source of potential suppliers; for the Supplier it creates a larger potential customer base for their products. Figure 4 details the Telecom Operations Map (developed inside the TeleManagement Forum) that may serve as a guide to understanding the relationships among identified process flows within a Service Provider (and to its customers) [11]. It is unlikely that all of the processes shown will be of equal priority for automation. In particular the Sales and Service and Network Planning & Development processes define areas that may be highly individual to a specific service provider. Automation will generally be focused on those areas where high repetition of basic information flows is a characteristic, or where a high value is perceived in ensuring rapid reaction. In the former case the emphasis is on cost reduction and increased accuracy of data. In the latter case the focus is about being more customer driven.

F u lf i ll m e n t

A ssu ran ce

O rd e r H a n d lin g

S a le s

P r o b le m H a n d lin g

C u s to m e r Q oS M anagem ent

B i ll i n g I n v o ic in g / C o lle c t io n

C u s to m e r C a re P ro c e s s e s

S e r v ic e P la n n in g / D e v e lo p m e n t

S e r v ic e C o n f ig u r a t io n

S e r v ic e P r o b le m R e s o lu t io n

S e r v ic e Q u a lit y M anagem ent

R a t in g a n d D is c o u n tin g

S e r v ic e / P r o d u c t D e v e lo p m e n t a n d M a in t e n a n c e P r o c e s s e s

N e tw o rk P la n n in g / D e v e lo p m e n t

N e tw o rk P r o v is io n in g

N e tw o r k In v e n t o r y M anagem ent

N e tw o rk M a in t e n a n c e & R e s t o r a t io n

N e tw o rk D a ta M anagem ent

N e tw o rk a n d S y s te m s M a n a g e m e n t P ro c e s s e s

Source: TMF. Ref 11

Figure 4: A simplified view of processes used by a service provider

Each service provider will need to evaluate these processes and identify how each process is performed internally. However, by using common terms to describe the functions performed within each process, it should be easier for all service providers to enter into negotiations with customers, third party suppliers and other service providers to agree upon key interface information flows. By focusing on the customer orientation, it should also be easier to gain a wider industry commitment to adopt a more standardized approach (in both service providers and vendors) to deliver products that support the model. Figure 4 also shows a broad breakdown of the process model into the three major customer focused activities. These are relevant to any customer-oriented business and consist of Service Fulfillment, Service Assurance and Service Billing processes. The purpose is to show how these processes need to integrate and work together to support the end-to-end activity of delivering customer services. Many organizations start on this path by providing a ‘thin veneer’ of customer care. It is soon evident that in order to support this effectively, they have to rapidly re-orient their whole operations environment to support the Customer Care system. This involves identifying the information requirements that are required to ‘flow-through’ from their other operations systems to integrate with the customer care applications. In doing this it is a natural progression to re-orient other processes (such the Service and Network management processes) to reflect a new way of working. Of course this is complex, and normally a migration path has to be planned.

CONCLUSIONS: FUTURE CONVERGENCE? While the telecommunications traditional users have been fitting to the services that are provided by operators, the shift to the Internet will bring up a new class of users more exacting that typically like to dictate their own needs. On the other side, the introduction of QoS in the Internet, and the enormous business opportunities it will bring, will confront new Internet operators with major changes on management strategies, which will require a business process approach. Overall business processes methodologies will be mandatory for widespread development of new services, specially due to the cooperative attitudes of the Internet. To support these changes, a framework is required able to support these strategies across multi-platforms. Theoretically, this framework should be populated with Enterprise, Telecom and appropriate general-purpose technology to build a hypothetical Common Platform. This platform will produce the tapestry where the “Information Society” will be based. The practical consequence of the existence of this platform is a trend towards the convergence of business processes between the Enterprise and the Telecom (PNOs, ISP, other SP) operator. The technology to support this platform may well exist at this moment: the Common Information Model, an object-based model for representing management information [10]. This technology was designed to support management applications, which includes providing a protocol neutral method for storing and consolidating access to the different protocol specific Management Information Bases, allowing inter-platform, multi-level, multi-provider, management paradigms. Furthermore, as IT is actively supporting Enterprise developments, and trends are increasingly in distributed systems approaches, IT technology is pushing distributed systems management evolution, creating the bridges to its reuse in the telecommunication world. IT technology may well be the unifying factor supporting common business processes across actors in the Internet world. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This work is being developed under the framework of ACTS project AC.207 DIFFERENCE (http://www.det.ua.pt/Projects/difference). REFERENCES [1]

R.L. Aguiar e J.L.Oliveira, “Issues on Internet Evolution and Management”, ICEIS'99, 1st International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems, Setúbal, Portugal, pp 563-571, March 1999.

[2]

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[3]

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[4]

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[5]

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[6]

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[7]

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[8]

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[9]

H .Lu et al., “Towards the PSTN/Internet Internetworking -Pre PINT Implementations”, Internet Request for Comments RFC 2458, November 1998.

[10]

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[11]

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