TMF Frameworx & MD Cameo Business Modeler – Part 1

The TeleManagement Forum is a global trade association with 1,000 member companies representing 100,000 professionals in 195 countries. The TM Forum is focused on bringing together the digital ecosystem, including communication service providers, digital service providers and enterprises, with the goal of enabling an open digital world. This series of articles introduce TMF Frameworx & MD Cameo Business Modeler and how it is being used to model the Frameworx reference material.

Frameworx is the TM Forum suite of best practices and standards that provides the blueprint for effective, efficient business operations. It enables you to assess and optimize performance using a proven, service-oriented approach to operations and integration. Frameworx is build on a services oriented design and uses standard, reusable, generic blocks that can be assembled in unique ways to gain the advantages of standardization while still allowing customization and enabling differentiation and competition  at the service level.

The components that comprise Frameworx are:

1. Business Process Framework
2. Information Framework
3. Application Framework
4. Integration Framework
5. Business Metrics
6. Best Practices

The Business Process Framework is a hierarchical catalog and classification scheme of the key business processes required to run a service-focused business. At the conceptual level, the framework has three major process areas, reflecting major focuses within typical enterprises:

• Strategy, Infrastructure and Product
• Operations
• Enterprise Management

The Information Framework provides a reference model and common vocabulary for all the information required to implement Business Process Framework processes. It reduces complexity in service and system integration, development and design by providing an off-the-shelf information model that can be quickly adopted by all parties.

The Application Framework provides a common language for communities who specify, procure, design, and sell operation and business support systems, so that they can understand each other’s viewpoints. It provides logical groupings of applications, then defines each application’s offered functionality.

The Integration Framework is a set of standards that supports the interoperability between applications defined in the Application Framework via TM Forum interfaces. The interfaces are defined in terms of the Information Framework’s entities/attributes, and the requirements for the interfaces from a business process perspective, which comes from the Business Process Framework.

TM Forum Business Metrics provide a balanced scorecard across finance, customer and operations areas.

• Revenue and Margin – financial performance indicators such as OpEx as a % of revenue or recovered leakage
• Customer Experience – indicators from the customer-facing side of the business
• Operational Efficiency – indicators around the key operational process areas of fulfillment, assurance, bill and call center

Best Practices provide practical tools that leverage Frameworx and help to improve end-to-end management of services across complex, multi-partner environment.

In the next part of this series we’ll look at how TMF Frameworx & MD Cameo Business Modeler can be used together to represent Frameworx material as a model using MagicDraw Cameo Business Modeler.