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By
Elaine Haher
There’s been plenty said in these columns and elsewhere about the idea of the service factory in telecom. But the practical experience of introducing it, combined with the relentless pace of convergence (both technical and commercial), throw up the need for a spring clean of the concept – and its realization. In particular, the pursuit of ubiquitous mobile broadband reveals the true extent of ambition needed from a service factory.
To recap: the Telecom Service Factory is an approach to order and fulfillment architectures that enables service providers to more quickly create new products and services from reusable components, and to efficiently assemble offers and orchestrate the handling of orders across service fulfillment process. So far, so good: rapid service innovation while avoiding the re-tooling of systems and processes that characterize the current mode of operation. It’s the sheer volume of what we now need to create for this dynamic and competitive marketplace that throws a monkey wrench into existing processes.
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OSS strategists must continue to expand their ambition for a service factory. |
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and multi-technology products, service
providers have typically created
workflow-based solutions that glue
provisioning processes together for a
particular product. A new product
means a new workflow, with little
thought for variability and component
re-use. More worryingly, without the
service factory’s concept of
componentized flows, the need to
create one long end-to-end flow per
product limits offer experimentation
and rapid variation, and impedes third
parties from innovating their own
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And we know that while traditional telco services can take months to move from an idea to a cross-organizational implementation, content aggregators such as Google can put up a new service within hours or minutes of its definition. They can then adjust its parameters based on response, and tear it down the same day if the offer misses expectations.
Having said that, traditional siloed
provisioning does work very well for
delivering existing products: one
product, one technology, from one
company. But for developing and
implementing innovative, multi-sourced
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offerings based on service provider
wholesaling capabilities. And that’s a
requirement that the service factory
will increasingly have to support.
Could today’s approach to provisioning continue to support new services? Certainly. Can custom-tailored workflows support a plethora of new service offerings in an efficient manner? Doubtful. The interactions and dependencies between service offerings/plans and underlying service capabilities/components would become too overwhelming if managed one at a time.
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