The evolution of M2M to IoT to IoE continues as we now enter the era of "Value Ecosystems". New business challenges emerge as this new paradigm emerges and organisations need to develop new capabilities internally or access them externally. Sharing risk and reward among partners requires transparency and trust, while the much touted "coopetition" model really comes into play.
Through a series of workshops carried out since April, the IoE & Digital Ecosystems group here at TM Forum has worked with global and regional CSPs, DSPs, technology suppliers, enterprises and advisory groups to gather key data on what stakeholders need, on barriers to ecosystem-based business and on capabilities required to overcome them.
Now, we'll be moving beyond the exploration phase to begin building the industry's first Ecosystem Business Architecture (EBA) through TM Forum member collaboration and we're excited to invite and encourage members to get involved. It's become evident that this is a timely initiative and action is needed now!
To begin with, we'll be working on harmonising terms and concepts across partners by creating a glossary; we'll also be producing "end-to-end" visualisations of digital ecosystem-delivered services taking distinct business scenarios and mapping players/roles, relationships (while also defining these), capabilities to be assured, value chains, fabrics and streams, and identifying potential weak points for revenue leakage and/or fraud. Our ambition is to work closely with the collaboration team working on the Open Digital Architecture (ODA) project at the Forum, which addresses the enterprise architecture requirements to support ecosystem-based business. Moving forward, we also plan on comparing scenarios together and drawing commonalities to offer an overall best practice ecosystem business architecture as a reference guide.
Collaboration will involve weekly one-hour conference calls and if and when possible, face-to-face working sessions, for example at TM Forum Action Week in Dallas (24-28 September 2018) for those able to make it. The team will be creating TM Forum assets available to all members once approved, thereby helping all players and the industry as a whole advance and thrive. It's a unique opportunity to truly shape the industry and be recognised as a thought leader. We will be covering the EBA progress across all our marketing channels and encourage contributors to do so as well. The first piece can be found here.
There will also be a webinar on the EBA taking place on the 30th of August, register
here.
Contact Thandi with any questions and to register your interest in becoming a contributor
tdemanet@tmforum.org ------------------------------
Thandi Demanet
TM Forum
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