Open APIs

Hello,

we are debating currently on the completeness of the "relationship space" in the CUSTOMER TMF 629 API area.  Concretely:

Most of the Customer's properties are "relationships/references"  to foreign domains like "Payment Method", "Account", etc. 

However, these mostly process-oriented domains, have their own (direct) relationships to "Customer" (aka "relatedParty") ,  so the reverse relationships in the Customer area are simply  for bidirectional navigation, should this be needed. 

We state/observe however, that the number of direct navigation paths is greater than the number of reverse paths, with one of the most important missing relationship being that to "Product" (Product Inventory). The Product inventory is used by us to design/map customer agreements for private customers (deployed/installed product/service base).

Question: How should we understand TMF completeness concern with respect to the Customer relationship space ?

Thanks in advance,

Best regards,

Adrian Ciornei,
Deutsche Telekom

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Adrian Ciornei
Deutsche Telekom AG
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Hi Adrian

You might be interested to learn that a Customer360 API is in design, this API will relate the customer object to pretty much anything that can be said to be "related to" or "owned by" the customer. This API comes to answer the need for an experience API, e.g. to support display of customer dashboard.

However the actual customer entity, as expressed in the Open API model, has relatively few direct relationships. Entities such as Product, Trouble Ticket, Product Order, Bill, Applied Billing Rate, Interaction (I think) and more, have relationships to the customer (via related party), but not from customer to them. Heuristically we could say (perhaps) that the relationships are modeled from customer only to entities in the direct sphere of party management.

Having said that, this is not completely consistent, since Customer has a relationship to Agreement.

Hope it helps.

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Jonathan Goldberg
Amdocs Management Limited
Any opinions and statements made by me on this forum are purely personal, and do not necessarily reflect the position of the TM Forum or my employer.
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