Digital services partnerships invariably result in systems integration and data sharing between partners and that is achieved through interactions aka Touch Points
Figure 1 depicts these interactions in a simple use case based on a mix of real world offers where only a customer and two partners are involved in digital service management It is a typical example .
Figure 1 - High level interaction between partners
To date, efforts of Service Providers, such as CSP or other large Enterprises, in attracting DSP partners and integrating with them have resulted most of the time in manual processes or custom-build for each individual partnership. It is clear that this approach is inefficient, and has resulted in:
- high costs of operation,
- slow time-to-value,
- poor customer experience,
- And lack of transparency in partner relationship.
Given that the key added value of the Service Providers is access to a large pool of known customers, an inability to rapidly deliver repeatable service and partnering at industrial scale is a major issue.
So, standardizing partnering methods is a priority and it is imperative to build out the required standards quickly. Being able to proceed in a repeatable and industrial manner based on reusable components with exposed APIs will be key for standardization.
In order to meet these challenges, TM Forum, within the Open Digital Economy program has been working with service providers and suppliers to develop APIs. They enable the open digital ecosystem and provide critical management functionality to digital services that rely on multiple partners and systems operating in a complex value chain.
To date, the Open Digital Economy program has delivered 12 APIs
- Product ordering API
- Catalog management API
- Trouble ticketing API
- Service level agreement API
- Performance management API
- Customer management API
- Party management API
- Usage API
- Billing API
- Product Inventory API
- Service Inventory API
- Resource Inventory API