1. Addressing the Transformational Needs of Telecommunications Operators

The telecommunications industry has changed tremendously during the last decades. Challenges of today’s telecommunications operators are, for example, enhanced customer orientation and product innovation combined with cost savings as well as shorter lead times. In many cases, this leads to continuous improvement and restructuring initiatives. Process standardization, automation through new software systems, outsourcing of support activities, and roll-out of new network technologies are just some of the typical topics of these initiatives. In this context, an aligned transformation of organization, processes, applications, data, and network technologies is a key success factor. The overall structure of such transformations is supported by general enterprise architecture methods. From a topical perspective, industry-specific reference solutions are proposed by well-recognized industry organizations, such as the TM Forum. This book explains the whole architectural transformation customized to fit the specific challenges of telecommunications operators. All phases are described, from the planning and set-up to the implementation. While this chapter provides an introduction and summary, in subsequent chapters the following details are discussed: Specifics of the telecommunications industry are described in Chap. 2, methodical principals are explained in Chap. 3, a concrete recommendation for the architecture solution is proposed in Chap. 4, and the planning and implementation are discussed in Chap. 5. This book gives the latest insights into the standard development, shows lessons learned from numerous international projects, and presents well-founded research results. Telecommunication practitioners, enterprise architects, project managers, researchers, and students alike benefit from numerous examples and illustrations.