Globe Telecom underwent a transformation through a new enterprise architecture, aiming to: simplify everyday communications and have the happiest customers.
Case study: Globe opens up a new digital world to customers
CASE STUDY
Globe Telecom Inc. is a leading telecoms company in the Philippines, a country with a population of more than 98 million people. The company’s mission is to enrich and simplify everyday communications to bring customers closer to what matters to them most; its vision is to have the “happiest customers”. Globe’s journey toward achieving these goals started four years ago and included formation of the company’s Enterprise Architecture Division, which is tasked with establishing the right structure, framework and governance in its architectural planning. The company chose TOGAF (see below) as the basis for its enterprise architecture and leveraged TM Forum’s Frameworx suite of models, tools, best practices and standards to implement it. For example, the Business Process Framework (eTOM) was adapted for the process architecture. The framework (Level 2) was also used to develop repeatable, efficient processes for management of the architecture (Levels 3 to 5).
Globe’s information architecture was based on the Information Framework (SID) but kept to a conceptual level representing the business user’s view, while the Application Framework (TAM) was adapted and infused with network capabilities to present a single view. The company developed the technology architecture itself from the ground up.
Benefits beyond transformation
Using enterprise architecture blueprints, Globe was able to define strategies and develop target architectures to transform its business and operational support systems (BSS/OSS). The blueprints have also helped Globe identify gaps in the architecture and set up initiatives to address them in the application architecture, for purposes beyond the BSS/OSS transformation, to gain new customer-supporting functionality. Some of the new functionality is already in place, while some is still in the planning stages: In addition, contact policy management would allow customers to manage their preferences regarding how (which channels) and how often Globe contacts them. Customers would be asked to opt in, rather than the onus being on them to opt out. Another strand of Globe’s analytics activities is master data management, which includes centralizing access to non-transactional data entities like customers, products and partners, resource data, and reference data such as postal addresses and street names, among other things, to ensure that data is high quality and consistent in definition and usage across the entire company. This has dramatically reduced the levels of fallout from processes and provides a holistic view of them. Work is underway right across the company to fully map all processes to the Business Process Framework, so that everyone can operate via the business process management engine. The enterprise service bus gives Globe the capacity to add internal applications and communications using the service-oriented architecture approach (on which Frameworx is based). This limits the impact of additions on other parts of the organization. The standardized approach enabled Globe to use commercial-off-the-shelf products to keep costs down and ease ongoing integration. It also means the applications are portable, giving the company many choices about whether to outsource them or run them in the cloud to gain greater cost and operational efficiencies.
Overall gains
Globe’s new architecture has reduced the level of complexity in IT and network infrastructure, through greater independence of applications and services, rather than them being tied to discrete systems. Hence Globe has unprecedented flexibility to build, buy or outsource IT and networking solutions. This has removed the mass of point-to-point linkages and given the company greater ability to address critical, enterprise-wide issues like security and privacy though common repeatable processes and applications being able to communicate with others as necessary. Simplified architecture and processes clarifies who owns and is responsible for what, including who makes final decisions. Previously the more siloed approach meant no one had ownership of a process from end to end. The cross-enterprise architecture and model enables better interoperability, simpler system and network management, and easier upgrades and changes to existing components. In short, the company is benefiting from much better enterprise-wide alignment in all aspects between the business, IT & networking organizations, including in strategy, processes, architectures and governance.
Early benefits indicate a cost avoidance of at least ₱45 million ($1 million) in 2014. The Enterprise Architecture Division has defined a set of enterprise architecture metrics to better quantify the value the methodology will bring to Globe in future.
Lessons learned and next steps
Instead of developing all its blueprints from scratch, the Enterprise Architecture Division significantly cut the time it took to design the architecture blueprints using TOGAF, and speeded deployment using TM Forum’s Frameworx and best practices. All of which helped the division and its practices gain acceptance across the company. Now the group wants to mature the enterprise architecture within Globe by completing the initial set-up phase and move toward full operationalization and sustainability. This will enable the division to create more value for the company from the architecture, and raise awareness of it and what it brings to the business. The ultimate goal is to ensure the enterprise architecture is value driven with strong linkages to the business, for example, by supporting the decision-making process to drive the optimization of investment in technology. Being able to plot enterprise-wide journeys through the enterprise architecture methodology is something that Globe plans to feed back into TM Forum for the benefit of others.
What is TOGAF and how does it fit with Frameworx?
TOGAF is a detailed method and set of supporting resources for developing an enterprise architecture, developed and endorsed by the membership of The Open Group. Frameworx is also used in many different environments, often in combination with other standards including TOGAF. TOGAF is the de facto global standard for enterprise architecture. The Open Group Architecture Forum has more than 200 enterprises participating to develop and maintain the TOGAF standard. It publishes successive versions at regular intervals. See more information on the latest version of the TOGAF framework. For more about the alignment of TOGAF and Frameworx, please contact Ken Dilbeck, Vice President, Collaborative R&D, TM Forum via kdilbeck@tmforum.org.
Case study at-a-glance