A week of accelerating industry standards

When a group of TM Forum members sat down together in Sala 1 of the Miragem Hotel in Cascais, Portugal in late May, the mood was upbeat. Everyone felt the energy and relief of finally being back working together in person. There was a common goal: to build solutions to help our members speed up, or Accelerate, their digital transformation journey.

As the week progressed, working relationships that were forged over Zoom during the past two years were strengthened over working sessions, coffee breaks and dinners in the local restaurants so that we left as friends, and looking forward to the next time we meet.

Below is a compilation of the highlights of the various sessions so you can get a snapshot of what was achieved.

Autonomous Operations – it’s all about consistency

In the Autonomous operations jam sessions, the focus was on creating a consistent architecture across closed loop automation, autonomous networks and AI Ops and ensure they all complement the Open Digital Architecture (ODA) and build on the Business Process Framework (eTOM) and Information Framework (SID). The key outcomes included:

• Agreed consistent terms and definitions across the architectures – focusing on closed loop and control loop. This is critical for the adoption of autonomous networks as you need consistency of definitions and terms. This has enabled a consistent architecture across closed loop anomaly detection and resolution automation (CLADRA) and autonomous networks (AN).
• SID proposal: ClosedLoop to be added to SID with a special subclass for ControlLoop – we need to add new definitions into the information model so that all processes are described in the same way using accurate terms from the SID.
• Discussed how policy could be added to Intent /ControlLoop Conceptual Model and a possible new Transformation Guide (Evolution) - policy is critical for intent and control loops to ensure the effective running of the control loops.

Open APIs – driving development

The Open API team worked collaboratively on several different topic areas during the week, taking inputs from subject matter experts in other domains for the accurate development of new Open APIs. Several APIs were specified (which I will explain more below) and the team reached an important milestone by completing the development of the V5 tooling and uplifting the first API to V5 (i.e. OAS v3). This was a significant achievement as their objective is to develop all TM Forum APIs to this level and use automated tooling to support this.

Intent - decoupling requirements from solutions

During the Intent code jam sessions, the members of the autonomous networks program celebrated by far the biggest moment in the life of the program. They completed the review and agreement on the Swagger (OAS) file for the Intent API (TMF921) with TM Forum’s Chief API Architect, Pierre Gauthier. As a result, the Intent API is now available in github to download, trial and test. Intent is critical to enable autonomous networks and it decouples requirements from solutions. Without it you will never achieve true autonomy. Intent is the expression of the requirements that an autonomous system needs to meet. This is what enables self-adapting networks, allowing the network to adapt to the required business outcomes.

Other notable outcomes from the Intent code jam were:

• Created proof points for the practical applicability of the intent work at TM Forum and demonstrated its value
• Demonstrated the flexible and broad applicability of the proposed concepts and how they can enable intelligent, autonomous, and highly adaptable implementations that meet the challenges of future zero-touch networking
• Detailed discussion on Intent Handling Loops logic and agents
• Intent Modelling (Turtle) tutorials
• SID Source of Truth session
• Shared Intent Models in Prolaborate
• Leaders in SID/API joint session acknowledged the TMF921 and Intent in SID “parallel” approach as best practice
• Intent-driven use cases and examples (to be continued)
• Work on examples of Business, Service and Resource Intents in Turtle
• Data Governance APIs
• Shared the API governance engine work with the API team for review and input. This is a critical step for the data governance engine which will be a suite of 9 TM Forum Open APIs to enable the automation of data governance.

Beyond connectivity – API suites to make it happen

On the topic of Zero-Touch Partnering (ZTP), 13 Open APIs have been identified for update and 12 new Open APIs to be created as part of a ZTP suite. This week at Accelerate was an excellent way to kick-start the work. The team trained and onboarded 13 developers and completed 3 Open API updates.

In addition, a design for the connectivity-as-a-service API profile was completed which lays the foundation for next generation connectivity, the essential need to shift as an industry how connectivity is consumed so that it is ubiquitous, delivering the right connectivity, at the right time, every time and hiding the increasingly complexity of connectivity.

ODA Components

The ODA component accelerator and network components workshops were abuzz all week, tackling individual areas of importance: ODA component specifications; behavioural driven design references; non-core functionality and network components. Some notable outcomes from the sessions were:

• Completed the specification for three new components. This is important as the objective was to develop the specification for all the components in an end-to-end use case. They picked use case three and have now specified six of the eight components. This is the first step in setting the foundation for an end-to-end working demo of components.
• Overall, they specified an additional three components, assigned another three to individuals, identified a further two as top priority (but with no one assigned yet), and prioritized six to the top of the backlog. So, there is line of sight to an additional 14 components, to add to the 10 already specified.
• Defined how to fully specify components in terms of Behavioral Driven Design and non-core functionality. This is a really important step forward, as it means they can now start to specify components to a level where vendors can develop them as products.

Overall, it is becoming apparent that the effort required to fully specify a component is high, but the benefit to the members is also high. Any individuals who can join this work in the ODA Components project will play a significant role in tackling this challenge for the benefit of the industry.

Human Factor – culture enabling transformation

The digital organizational transformation (DOT) team had busy sessions all week, working intensively on several core deliverables aiming to drive the evolution of organizational cultures and mindsets in order to achieve digital transformation – namely a culture maturity model, a culture & skills guidebook and an inclusion and diversity score solutions toolkit. Here is a summary of their outcomes:

• Completion of strategy sub-dimension levels of the DOT strategic alignment dimension
• Completion of “organization” and “data” and “customer” sub-dimension levels of the Culture maturity model strategic alignment dimension
• Agreed the concept, approach and drafted the 10-step framework and practical solutions to support GB1031
• Completed culture & skills guidebook structure
• Framework of “IDS solutions toolkit” drafted

Congratulations are in order

The week ended on a high note with a celebration of the achievements of the week and a ceremony awarding of 13 Open API outstanding contributor awards. You can see all the winners here.

Work will continue back on Zoom on all the member collaboration projects in the weeks and months ahead until we can meet again in person. To get involved and add your expertise, join the projects here.