The communications industry today experiences many of the pressures and challenges that affect other business types, including how to cut costs while improving service to customers, how to be more flexible and innovative, and how to adapt to changing markets and business models. Most industries, including telecom, have information and process silos that contain inaccurate data and are built on a fragmented, spaghetti-like back office of generations of legacy systems.
Since its inception, the communications industry has seen itself as special, needing hand-built, expensive technologies to support its unique business model and scale. But as the industry evolves, a lot can be learned from understanding how others outside the industry are tackling similar challenges to work smarter and are working to create, deliver and monetize services through a highly simplified, automated and integrated infrastructure.
At the TM Forum, we help companies become agile and flexible enough to adapt quickly to new business models, new technologies and new partnering agreements in today's digital services market. We are increasingly looking at approaches adopted by other industry segments, both to learn new tricks and to leverage commercial, off-the-shelf technologies. We are also in the process of aligning our work with other major industry-wide initiatives, including service-oriented architecture (SOA) and the ITIL process management model.
We're likewise finding that things we've done can offer a lot to others. For example, our Business Process Framework (eTOM) is a very rich end-to-end enterprise business model compared with ITIL, which is primarily a process model for running IT within an enterprise.
It's a two-way street -- the wider industry is learning from us and we're learning from it. From a TM Forum perspective, it means we're upgrading and enhancing our existing frameworks to align with external software standards, which are absolutely critical to the SOA approach.