In recent years, service providers have accelerated product introductions, expanded into new regions, and acquired new partners and subsidiaries in recent years.
All this has led to yet more databases with different information structures, different terminology, different rules, and different degrees of information quality.
In this context, absent a serious effort to standardize, integrate, and simplify product data across the organization, service providers have little hope of creating the kind of product lifecycle management (PLM) systems and processes they will need to succeed in the years ahead.
Lo and behold, the enterprise product catalog (EPC) is designed precisely to solve this problem.
For enterprise architects in particular, EPC represents a chance to get in front of a major challenge facing all service providers: transforming PLM to respond effectively to the rise of Telco 2.0.