Pipeline Publishing, Volume 4, Issue 5

	This Month's Issue:
	Keeping Promises

NPI for Life: Collaborate for Better Products

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As we mentioned, effective strategy includes ongoing assessments and knowledge sharing. In telecom, ongoing information on customer satisfaction is available in the Contact Center. This means that good NPI means having proper Contact Center Analytics tools and processes in place before Launch. This provides critical, empirical “truth” on how a product is being received and what difference it is making to the customer.

Component Infrastructure for Post-Modern NPI

The cleanest, cheapest, and quickest way to introduce new products is to develop an infrastructure base that is designed toward NPI and full product lifecycle. Many advances in IT technology today support the implementation of a general purpose, reusable infrastructure for supporting products in development and operations. These new tools are associated with the IT technology advancements of Components and SOA. Our telecom industry has gone further down this path. With the specification of the TMF’s NGOSS, many of the processes associated with NPI have become codified and standardized. More products are appearing on the market that implement the components and process of product life cycle. These have had good showing in recent catalyst projects.

The development of component and service technology was, in large part, driven by the desire of companies, and by telecom in particular, to create a better approach to delivering software applications and products. Specifically, components were driven by a requirement for significant software reuse. In evolving the concepts and now the technologies for components, the requirement for rapid software product development is now realized in purchasable infrastructures. However, not all the components are yet commercialized, but enough are available to support at least small product changes with full tool kits.

NGOSS, one of the most developed process-driven, component architectures, has a well-described approach to supporting NPI. Processes in the eTOM describe the lifecycle of products within the telecom space. In the decomposition of these processes a significant number of information artifacts (SID) have been modeled. These are gathered into what NGOSS calls Abstract Business Entities (ABE) which is the NGOSS equivalent of an application. Specifically the NGOSS “Product & Offer Development & Retirement” process provides for the following services:

Gather and Analyze New Product Ideas
Assess Performance of Existing Products
Develop New Business Proposal
Develop Product Commercialization Strategy
Develop Detailed Product Specifications
Manage Product Development
Launch New Products
Manage Product Exit

These processes are not necessarily sequential. Instead the service architecture supports event driven entry and reentry as required. As more NGOSS components become available, we expect that large NPI offerings will be supportable via this approach. In fact, we recommend using this technology now for large product service offerings (even with the approach start-up costs) such as IMS and fiber-to-the-home so that incremental service improvement will be supported by these tools.

Modern SOA and Web services, SaaS and Virtualization are related IT technologies which are consistent with component enabled NPI and which promise significant additional improvements in the future. Eventually it will be possible to automate the entire IT delivery of a product service based on demand within architectures approaches such as self-* (self-star) systems.

Today, just the technology of NPI product catalogs, common data models, and service assembly is commercialized. These new advances facilitate production of a product factory suitable for managing service product improvement to a large product domain offering. Further, they can leverage existing service components for bringing the next large product domain into existence cheaper and faster. In 2006, TMF Catalysts demonstrated the Product and Service Assembly Initiative (PSA) last January. In the PSA, an active catalog closely couples the processes of service design, creation, and execution by deconstructing every piece of data in a service provider’s product catalog into a component library made up of “building blocks” of information. Each component is made aware of how it must interact with every other component in the catalog - each component becomes reusable.

This approach is culminating in the future Service Delivery Framework.

Service Delivery Framework (SDF)

We all know that designing and delivering new services to the telecom customer is no longer just about rolling out new network technologies. Increasingly, services are moving up the value chain and the network is just a platform for delivering consistent and quality, personalized services anywhere the customer needs them. A successful NPI must address the intersection of IT technologies, media & content, and communications networks. This represents an explosion in the outlets a network must provide to reach every customer, anywhere and anytime, with an implosion of content services drawn from both the internet and every media producer and format available.

With TMF’s experience with component service standardization, gained in developing NGOSS, a reasonable next step was to tackle the creation of a plug-n-work support structures. This ongoing project is the definition of a Service Delivery Framework. Keith Miller, MD of Pendragon Consulting Ltd., who originated the SDF program in the TMF, explains:

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