Yesterday in Part One we introduced you to eTOM.Today, we're going to explore more about it's features and benefits, as opposed to comparing it with ITIL.
In tomorrow's third and final part - we will pull everything together and provide you with more information on ITIL comparisons and possible futures.
From the home of eTOM, the Telemanagement Forum, we know that "The eTOM Business Process Framework represents the whole of a service provider’s enterprise environment. The Business Process Framework begins at the Enterprise level and defines business processes in a series of groupings.
The Framework is defined as generically as possible so that it is organization, technology and service independent and supports the global community.
At the overall conceptual level (see Figure 1), eTOM can be viewed as having the following three major process areas:-
- Strategy, Infrastructure & Product covering planning and lifecycle management
- Operations covering the core of operational management
- Enterprise Management covering corporate or business support management
Some of the specific business benefits of using the eTOM within your organization are:
- It develops a scope addressing all enterprise processes.
- It distinctly identifies marketing processes to reflect their heightened importance in an ebusiness world.
- It distinctly identifies Enterprise Management processes, so that everyone in the enterprise is able to identify their critical processes, thereby enabling process framework acceptance across the enterprise.
- It brings Fulfillment, Assurance and Billing (FAB) onto the high-level framework view to emphasize the customer priority processes as the focus of the enterprise.
- It defines an Operations Support & Readiness vertical process grouping, that relates to all the Operations functional layers. In integrating ebusiness and making customer self-management a reality, the enterprise has to understand the processes it needs to enable for direct and (more and more) online customer operations support and customer self-management.
- It recognizes three process groupings within the enterprise that are distinctly different from operations processes by identifying the SIP processes, i.e., Strategy & Commit, Infrastructure Lifecycle Management and Product Lifecycle Management.
- It recognizes the different cycle times of the strategy and lifecycle management processes and the need to separate these processes from the customer priority operations processes where automation is most critical. This is done by decoupling the Strategy & Commit and the two Lifecycle Management processes from the day-to-day, minute-to-minute cycle times of the customer operations processes.
- It moves from the older customer care or service orientation to a customer relationship management orientation that emphasizes customer self-management and control, increasing the value customers contribute to the enterprise and the use of information to customize and personalize to the individual customer.
- It adds more elements to this customer operations functional layer to represent better the selling processes and to integrate marketing fulfillment within Customer Relationship Management. Note that Customer Relationship Management within the eTOM framework is very broadly defined and larger in scope than some definitions of CRM.
- It acknowledges the need to manage resources across technologies, (i.e., application, computing and network), by integrating the Network and Systems Management functional process into Resource Management & Operations. It also moves the management of IT into this functional layer as opposed to having a separate process grouping.
- It recognizes that the enterprise interacts with external parties, and that the enterprise may need to interact with process flows defined by external parties, as in ebusiness interactions.
So we've got a sense of comparison from yesterday against ITIL (it's much wider in scope than first thought) and we've learnt more about the benefits today. Tomorrow we close out with a presentation that details much more about eTOM's linkages with ITIL.
In the meantime,
Learn More About eTOM here...
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