Distributing Operational Support to Transform Business Operations

Operational support is increasingly a key differentiator for telecommunications operators. It is an essential part of launching and delivering telecommunications services. However, the quickening pace of new product and service launches, together with increasing customer expectations and changes in commercial structures for service delivery, all highlight the need for more imaginative ways of providing operational support. This paper describes some innovative work at BT to introduce collaborative working into the end-to-end processes of operational support, between supplier and customer. It has applied the principles of community of interest networks (running over extranets) to back-office processing in the carrier business, between operators. Distributed systems principles and technologies underpin the technical design, and business benefits are available to all the organisations using it.