ITIL, eTOM, standards and the service provider world

[Ladyhawk]

Hi ITIL community,

I am new to this site. I found it as I was do some research on an internal debate with my colleagues regarding Tier vs Level when refering to customer Trouble Tickets, incidents, priorities, etc .relative to processes and work flows. I need of course to get my certification in ITIL as it appears to be the NEW HOT thing... and is taking over as a prime in the area of industry standard reference.

My problem is that I come from the telecoms world and not IT... I am an engineer by education and have been in Network Operations, NOCs, and the BOT of them for years. I have even been the Director of more than one NOC with a global presence.

I am now and have for the past 5 years been doing OSS/BSS architecture work, so it is obvious that I cross over into what is now considered the IT domain. Since I am a telecoms person I have been imbedded in "Best Pratices" and standards (ETSI, ITU, ANSI etc.) forever. I have gotten my eTOM certification and I use it now. I have been through BSPs, TQM, TMN, FCAPS and I think there are some others I just can't remember at the moment.

Here is my diffculty and I bet you thought I would never get to it . How to relate all this and map them to each other. How to resolve the differences in how "IT" defines the world vs how a "Networks" person sees it.

I don't know if anyone else out there is facing this kind of dilemma but, if you are I would so appreciate some advice. Thanks in advance!

[Menefee]

I assume you are concerned about communication between various groups. You pointed out the current debate "tier vs. level" as an example of this miscommunication. And perhaps that is itself is the problem.

ITIL is not a how-to manual in and of itself. It merely provides a direction and a means of keeping various departments on the same page. There several terms that we have to deal with when implementing ITIL that do not match our internal departmental terms. And that is the purpose of a ITIL framework, it acts as the common ground. So both parties know that when speaking of a "Service" we are speaking in ITIL terms not specific to any industry or culture.

Acting as the liason between varous teams and when outsourcing they may be from a different industy in a different culture itsn't easy, even with a common dictionary of terms and that is why the pay can be good.

[Ladyhawk]

Hi Thanks for taking the time to reply. I appreciate your thoughts and view on the subject. It does not however help me with my core issue, which is how we map all these standards together... ITIL is relativley new, considering that some of the ones I have refered to earlier have been around for many years and are still used in the indusrty... You are absolutely correct in stating that we need a common language to ensure we are all talking about the same thing... it was not something I had a problem with before.. now so much has changed and progressed in the industry and it appears to me to have we have gotten lost in all the noise and the speed at which we are changing.

IT has traditionally been an area that was concerned with business information systems... HR, Finance, Facilities Management, hardware (PCs and Servers, e-mail etc) important ,but not Real Time applications in the true sense of the word... applications that were a little more forgiving when incidents occured, .. ie the BSS side of the house... now they have moved into the real time world of Network Operations and the world of Network and OSS which is a lot less forgiving to any downtime or service effecting impairments, I am not that the full comprehension of that difference has been fully appericated...

Since I am not an ITIL certified person and have not read the 7 volumes... yet... I can not say if somewhere in there is some mapping to the needs, enviroment, and existing mature pratices of the networks orientation does not exists... so that is what I am here trying to find out... I know there is some ongoing work with eTOM, which is now an ITU-T standard, but where is the standardization between the world of IT and the world of Network/Service providers... I dare not call it Telecommunicatins any more.. since the IP dominace of the industry today... which is another story with a lot of Gaps...

I am willing to change!!! I need some direction to get there and I would really like to know if anyone else is having diffculty with the shift?

Thanks in advance for any positive feedback!!!!

[scrufmonst]

There may be one place you could check .... you had mentioned that there is a standard that you have to work against in the eTOM arena, why not take that standard and bounce it against the ISO 20K standard that ITIL uses for its governance.

regards

scott

[itsmer]

I understand wer u r coming from as I had a few discussions on this a year back with one of my telecom client. we had 3 six hour marathon discussions on trying to understand and map similarities. I have a few suggestions, it may hold good for you or not but anyway.

1. Dont try to match or map them..understand the basis of their existence
that is.. e-tom,tl900 are there for telecom as a business..itil,cobit,iso2000 are there to give guidines to IT to support business users be it manufacturing,telecom,health care..etc..
provisioning,billing etc are telecom business processes supported by IT applications
2. Just read up something simpler than red and blue book as there may b too much information..there are a lot of sales presentations on the net which you may find useful.
3.After a few weeks then try to list out activities performed by a process of itil and then a process in tl9000.. understand how they might interact (take one process for starters)
viola..thats ur mapping..
i hope i made some sense....
cheers

[Ladyhawk]

Thanks for the information and the advise. i will check this out and let you know how I get on with it

I think part of my probelm is that in the past, at least for me as a Network Operations person, IT was the world of BSS and we did not have much inter-action with them on our OSS. We only used the data center for our back up systems and redundacy. All of the NOC systems were co-located with the NOC.

I always had systems application engineers to install, configure, upgrade, and maintain the the OSS systems in the NOC. They most surely had IT skills as it realted to the boxes and the unserlying OS, but they had a broader remit in that they were required to have a working knowledge and understanding of the Network Operations functions and needs and the applications that supported the capabilities of the NOC to manage Operations and Networks.

All of this has been converging like a high speed train. It seems that IT has jumped into the OSS and Network Operations world with both feet and there appear to be gaps in our understanding of each others worlds.

I am trying to catch up as quiclky as I can. I now mostly am doing a lot work with systems architecture for Network Operations Centers and Business Process Development, which has really highlighted the differences for me and is futher complicated by this gap. We seem to focus differently and we certainly lanaguage things differently.

So again thanks for the input!!!!

[Kyoanna]

I agree with Itsmer. You don't need to map all the mentioned above standards and specifications.
That's what I do in such complicated situations: I try to understand the idea and general model and then look at the problem or system, which is going to be implemented.

I think you should think about the main funcionalities or services needed in this system, what can help you with architecture definitions. And then find the standards you should begin with, and later detail using another standards or best-practises.

However, I am not an architect, but an analyst of telecommunication IT systems and I am also dealing with relations between ITIL, eTOM, ITU and so on...

Although, I'm new in ITIL, I have the hunch that ITIL is rather general thing, which can be detailed by e.g. eTOM. For example: we have Incident process defined in ITIL and we need to make relations betweeen service level incidents and resource level incidents.

[Ladyhawk]

Thanks to both of you for taking time out your busy day to participate in this discussion and your advise. I have found a forum on IEEE which is focused on the the Network Operations and Management area (http://www.comsoc.org/socstr/org/operation/techcom/netop.html) of our business and hopefully I can get some more information there on the changing landscape.

I have had some conversation with some of the solutions vendors experts Iand ahve found that at least there are others out there confronting these issues. At least I don't feel like the only one that has these questions.

I think also at this juncture I getting some oficial training and certifcations in ITIL would be best.

[Kyoanna]

Hello:)

Thanks for the link, you have found on IEEE - I think it will be also very useful in my job.

About the ITIL certificates ...I am also going to do something about that - maybe in 2008;) maybe I will have some time then.

Good luck:)