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Spotlight on BT products and services
BT Network Operations Centre: service management to maximise return on investment
Increasing commercial complexity, new technologies and the convergence of telecoms, media, IT and the internet are changing telecoms business models. Organisations need to be able to launch ICT services quickly and at low cost, transforming the agility of not just their own operations but those of their customers too. Service reliability is also important: an organisation that guarantees a service level agreement (SLA) can differentiate itself from others.
To help you remain competitive in the challenging 21st century marketplace, BT's next-generation Network Operations Centre with its asset-centric service management architecture offers a cost-effective, centralised approach to network services and support. BT Network Operations Centre helps deliver increased reliability and improved performance for you and your customers, and changes the focus of the operational culture from technology to service management. By enabling a proactive response to any service impact, BT Network Operations Centre helps minimise the time to provide or restore a service. This approach also helps you to increase asset usage to its potential operational capacity, maximising the return on investment.
Asset-centric service management
A common dynamic networked IT architecture provides high service availability and increased business agility: the network shares all resources to reduce cost, and its infrastructure is flexible. However, to remain competitive in the market, organisations must respond to customer requests to improve quality and delivery of service. Organisations need to monitor and manage the behaviour of each service. BT has therefore introduced asset-centric service management: each serving asset in the common dynamic networked IT architecture plays a crucial role in identifying its associated services. If an event occurs, an organisation can identify the affected services and define operational priorities to meet the SLA.
Figure 1 shows BT's asset-centric service management architecture.
Figure 1: Asset-centric service management
Monitoring
Within BT’s asset-centric service management architecture, status monitoring provides information about service availability, while performance monitoring provides intelligence about the full spectrum of service degradations. Thus, management can become proactive rather than reactive. Further equipping the monitoring capability with trend analysis develops the highest level of management maturity, offering preventive management and enhancing service quality to its peak.
Configuration and inventory management
Through configuration management, organisations can shape the behaviour of their networks to respond to customer requests. The combination of monitoring capability and configuration management provides the necessary foundation to enable a business to achieve its objectives for time to market, time to provide and time to repair or restore, and ensure it remains competitive.
Inventory management is also a core functionality in this asset-centric service management architecture. This inventory management plays a pivotal role: the record of assets and their associations with services introduces a new service layer that enables service management.
Service management
The service layer develops consistent communications between customer requests and the network, enabling a continuous business cycle from order to cash (see Figure 2). In this cycle, provisioning functionality and inventory management decompose and map customer orders to the relevant technology and create the necessary relationships to offer an end-to-end service. The monitoring platforms with their auto-discovery capabilities can be modified to keep the inventory platform synchronized with the network and application status from both physical and availability points of view. Therefore, provisioning with its clear service-oriented approach can successfully deliver products and services first time, every time, in a quality manner, leading to reduced CapEx and OpEx.
Figure 2: Communication within BT’s asset-centric service management architecture
By consolidating information at the service management platform, asset-centric service management introduces root-cause analysis capability to identify an affected device or application. Service management’s unique recording capability logs the occurrence of an event as the master case against the affected device. The service management platform consults with the inventory platform to identify and generate sub-cases for affected services and monitor the process from failure to recovery. This capability enables organisations to accurately measure service availability and manage SLAs, and it changes the operational culture to become service oriented. By redefining service restoration as an operational priority, measured against the SLA, organisations can offer guaranteed SLAs and stand out from their competitors.
3-tier BT Network Operations Centre architecture
BT's next-generation Network Operations Centre has three tiers: distributed collection and presentation layers and centralised management create a secure, flexible and scalable architecture (see Figure 3). This 3-tier architecture enables the Network Operations Centre to be totally independent of the operational model; organisations can adjust their operational models transparently to meet market demands as often as required.
The bridging service management layer of BT's next-generation Network Operations Centre creates a clear definition of roles and responsibilities within different departments of the organisation, simulating the business cycle of order management, provisioning, service monitoring maintenance and billing, and creating a customer-supplier relationship. Circulation of information within the organisation, in conjunction with clear demarcations between departments, enables the business to focus on achieving the highest performance objectives for each service.
Figure 3: 3-tier Network Operations Centre architecture
How BT can help improve your service delivery
BT gained extensive operational experience during its transformation to becoming a leading global ICT service provider - experience that it can share to help others in the industry improve service delivery standards. BT offers to help you build upon your current operational capability and take you through to maturity.
To enable you to develop a common dynamic networked IT infrastructure in conjunction with a next-generation Network Operations Centre, BT offers its services as consultancy or "design, build, operate/transfer". With help from BT, you can then develop the required operational processes to deliver proactive operational capability.
BT can also help you develop innovative new wave services, integrated with your existing products and services, to create extra revenue streams, improve your market share and maximise return on investment.
BT can help with any of the following scenarios:
- Auditing and tuning existing Network Operations Centres (systems, processes and organisations)
- Consolidating multiple Network Operations Centres
- Green-field or brown-field design
- Network, process and organisational design
- Turnkey build, deployment and operation of Network Operations Centres with transfer back to the customer (systems, processes and organisation)
- Integration with wider systems and business operations
- Creating a network and systems roadmap for the Network Operations Centre
- Creating a business case for the Network Operations Centre
- Producing a transformation roadmap for the Network Operations Centre
Through working with BT, you can benefit by:
- Sharing BT’s wealth of knowledge and experience
- Enjoying a guaranteed next-generation Network Operations Centre build
- Using proven and optimised operational processes
- Establishing an optimised operational structure via BT's operational risk management methodology
- Sharing BT's product management experiences to create new revenue
- Maximising revenue by introducing new integrated products and services
- Creating a new competitive edge to become a market leader
To find out more about BT Network Operations Centre or to discuss how we can help, please see our webpage or contact your account manager.
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