Abstract
The potential of electronic markets in enabling innovative product bundles through flexible and sustainable partnerships is not yet fully exploited in the telecommunication industry. One reason is that bundling requires seamless de-assembling and re-assembling of business processes, whilst processes in telecommunication companies are often product-dependent and hard to virtualize. We propose a framework for the planning of the virtualization of processes, intended to assist the decision maker in prioritizing the processes to be virtualized: (a) we transfer the virtualization pre-requisites stated by the Process Virtualization Theory in the context of customer-oriented processes in the telecommunication industry and assess their importance in this context, (b) we derive IT-oriented requirements for the removal of virtualization barriers and highlight their demand on changes at different levels of the organization. We present a first evaluation of our approach in a case study and report on lessons learned and further steps to be performed.
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Notes
In the past the TM Forum has used following terms for their EA framework: NGOSS, Solution Framework, TM Forum Framewox (in historical order). In our study we use the most recent one “TM Forum Frameworx.”
“Semantics utilised for Process Management within and between Enterprises” (SUPER) is a research project founded by an international consortium of software vendors, service providers and research teams. See www.ip-super.org for further details.
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Czarnecki, C., Winkelmann, A. & Spiliopoulou, M. Services in electronic telecommunication markets: a framework for planning the virtualization of processes. Electron Markets 20, 197–207 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12525-010-0045-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12525-010-0045-8