BPTrends January 2005 eTOM and ITIL
Copyright © 2005 Jenny Huang All rights reserved.
www.bptrends.com
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eTOM and ITIL:
Should you be Bi-lingual as an IT Outsourcing Service Provider?
Jenny Huang
Service Providers’ Dilemma
Over the recent years, the sourcing of IT-enabled services has been facilitated tremendously by
the rapid evolution and expansion of the converged data and network services provided by the
global telecommunications infrastructure. At the same time, ICT (Information, Communication &
Technology) service providers have been confronted with formidable challenges because of the
growing trend of Fortune 500 companies to delegate their IT-intensive business activities to
external service providers.
The IT outsourcing service provider bears a great responsibility for a client’s business success.
Indeed, IT infrastructure is the heart of every business. The effectiveness of the IT is the
effectiveness of the business. Therefore, the best known best practice of IT service management-
-ITIL (IT Infrastructure Library)--often becomes one of the major acceptance criteria when
companies hand over their business-critical IT infrastructure to their outsourcing service
providers.
IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL)
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was developed by the Central Computer and Telecommunications
Agency of the British government and adopted by many companies as their internal IT best
practice. However, for many of the ICT service providers, especially in the Telecom industry,
eTOM
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(enhanced Telecom Operations Map) is more widely applied and deployed for end-to-end
service delivery and support. This paper provides a high-level overview of the similarities and the
differences between ITIL and eTOM and how service providers can leverage the strength of both
to deliver high-quality services. With this paper, we hope to establish the basis for further
discussions on future issues concerning eTOM/ITIL implementation strategies, such as meta-
model implementation for ITIL CMDB (Configuration Management Database), Ontology/Business
Semantic based process discovery, and how to apply OMG’s Model Driven Architecture (MDA)
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specifications to accomplish these tasks.
Similarities and Differences
eTOM is part of the NGOSS
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program from the TeleManagement Forum. eTOM is a business
process framework to guide the development and management of key processes within a
telecommunications service provider. It provides this guidance by offering a catalogue of industry-
standard names and descriptions, with scope at multiple hierarchical levels. eTOM started back in
1995, known then as the TOM. Based on traditional network management standards, TOM
added the perspective of business process. TOM very much focused on just the operational
process needs. Since starting in 1999, eTOM has gradually added strategic, marketing, and
product lifecycle planning and Enterprise process elements. One of eTOM’s objectives is to aid
the end-to-end automation of information and communications services for business and
operations processes by using the holistic eTOM process framework for its entire value chain,
including, for example, the service providers, customers, the software/hardware vendors, and
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ITIL® is a registered trademark of OGC – the Office of Government Commerce. http://www.itsmf.com/
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eTOM® is a registered trade mark of the TeleManagement Forum (http://www.tmforum.org)
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MDA – Object Management Group Model Driven Architecture, http://www.omg.org/mda/
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NGOSS - New Generation Operations Systems and Software, http://www.tmforum.org/browse.asp?catID=1911
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