Cable Information Architecture_SCTE_Nov14

58 59Vol. 36 No. 4 - November 2014 Issue Vol. 36 No. 4 - November 2014 Issue

This article describes an emerging Information Business

Architecture that provides cable operators with business

risk analytics. The architecture was designed to improve the

business performance of enterprises and service providers.

Its risk concentration analysis framework offers the ability to

identify, quantify and compare vulnerabilities (risks) throughout

an organisation.

It identifies the materiality – that is, the actual cost to the

business – of operations and customer care issues. Then it

ranks them according to their potential impact on business

performance. This helps to prioritize and schedule risk

mitigation activities such as field services and truck rolls. As

such, it also provides a solution for managing enterprise-

wide tasks such as business process automation, problem

resolution, resource allocation and overall spending.

The architecture enables cable operators to measure risks in

terms of their financial or reputational impact. Outcomes of

implementing the architecture typically include:

l Improved customer experience;

l Reduced organisational risk;

l Reduced operational expense;

l Competitive advantages.

The need for information architectures An Integrated Business Architecture provides an industry

agreed, service-oriented approach for rationalising operational

IT, processes and systems.

By using standard, reusable, generic blocks, businesses

gain the advantage of standardisation while still allowing

customisation where necessary. This, in turn, enables cable

operators (and other service providers) to significantly reduce

their operational costs and improve customer service and

business agility.

The TM Forum has published IT and process

architecture that embraces major IT industry

standards such as ITIL and TOGAF. The

Framework is a hierarchical catalogue of

the key business processes required to run

a service-focused business. (See sidebar

overleaf.)

Core business entitiesTo effectively serve their customers, cable

operators have developed and evolved a

number of definitions for core concepts such as locations,

addresses, individuals and organisations, products, services and

resources. Information Business Architectures were designed to

work in concert with and report on Core Business Entities.

These attributes represent a core set of objects. They have

strength through being clearly defined and reusable. Ideally,

they should be implemented once and then be accessed

via a core model. These objects are referred to as the Core

Business Entities in the information architecture.

Core Business Entities are the core set of things in which any

enterprise is interested. (See sidebars 2 and 3 on pages 47

and 49). They are typically responses to Who, What, Where,

Why and Why questions, as represented in Figure 1 below.

Who: “Who” is the Party or Party Role. This can be Customers,

Service Providers, Employees and other individuals and

organisations that interact with the business. During these

interactions, Parties play ‘Roles’ which have a number of

typical characteristics. These include attributes such as

Name, Address, Contact Medium etc. Parties are typically

tracked by the business during the lifecycle of their respective

interactions.

What: “What” is the Product, Service or Resource.

l Products are typically customer-facing services or

resources. This includes Data, Telephony, High Speed

Data or even a broadcast event.

l In contrast, a Service is typically something provided either

to support a Product, or as a result of the Product. For

example, it could be “installation” services or “streaming”

service to delivery the broadcast event.

l Resources are part of an enterprise’s infrastructure and

are used by the Service. This includes the cable plant and

associated inventory.

Figure 1: Relationship of Who, What, Where, Why and When in a Core Business Entity.

By Myles Kennedy, Laurie Asperas and Evan Birkhead, Rev2 Networks

In this final entry of its three-part, back-office series, the Rev2 Networks’ team describes an Information Business Architecture that enables efficient Cable TV customer care and network operations. The first article explained how to track the customer journey through intelligent analytics of End-to-End Customer ticketing. The second explained how Event Processing Networks provide efficient, real-time management of customer data.

Emerging Technologies: An Information Business Architecture that Enables Efficient

Cable Operations and Enhances Customer Experience

Myles is an internationally experienced

customer relationship consultant with

expertise in business analysis, service

design and transition, and operational

best practices.

Myles Kennedy, Business Development & Product Consultant

technicaltechnical

Laurie has worked in diverse industries

tracking strategy and technology

successfully through time. Navigating

different social groups, she connects

social needs and technologies. At

Rev2, her role is focused on expanding

the footprint of RiskView, the flagship

product.

Laurie Asperas, Strategy Officer

Evan’s tech sector experience dates

back to his years in journalism when

he was news editor of LAN Computing

magazine (1990-94) and editor-in-chief

of Internetwork magazine (1994-97). He

has been in network industry marketing

ever since.

Evan Birkhead, Business Development


This enables predictive analytics that identify problems before

they snowball out of control. By catching costly issues early in

their lifecycle, the system prevents the “death by a thousand

paper cuts” that is dreaded by CFOs.

Technical overviewThe architecture is a highly extensible platform for fact-based,

scalable, repeatable business risk analytics and decision-

making. It actively mines, weighs and correlates inputs from

disparate heterogeneous data sources. At the heart of the

architecture is an analytical Risk Data Warehouse that is fed

by Data Source Adapters as shown in Figure 2 above.

The domain expertise designed into the Adapters for collection

and abstraction of data sources distinguishes the architecture

from generic business intelligence solutions. Collectively,

Adapters span the entire cable operator’s business. The net

result is a time-based snapshot of business performance.

A key differentiator of the architecture is its ability to identify the

business materiality of risks according to their potential impact

on business performance, which helps operators to prioritise

business processes, problem resolution and overall spending.

Additionally, the architecture’s unique ability to normalise

and correlate data across multiple data sources allows for a

quantitative comparison and measurement of different risks.

The architecture enables a materiality score to be assigned to

each risk across the operator’s service delivery infrastructure,

enabling material risks to stand out from the rest. After

collecting vulnerability data throughout the business, a score

is assigned to each “risklet” that reflects its likelihood to cause

What are entities?

A business entity is a thing of interest

to the business. Business entities are

characterised by attributes. Business

entities also possess other properties,

such as involvement in associations

with other business entities or entity

types and exhibition of behaviour.

These properties (attributes, associations

and behaviour) of business entities may

be inherited by the other entity types or

other business entities. A core business

entity represents five basic concepts

present in the day-to-day running of

every enterprise. The concepts are

who, what, where, when and why.

These business entities support

processes in the Product, Service

and Resource layers of the eTOM.

A core business entity may also be

a business entity that is common to

a number of eTOM processes, for

example Location and Address.

A core model contains the artifacts

that fully describe core business

entities. The artifacts include core

business entity definitions and UML

models. The UML models contain

class diagrams that document the

attributes and operations of the core

business entities.

Figure 2. Operations and care information architecture.

technicaltechnical

Where: “Where” is the physical or logical Location or Address.

Locations are typically an actual place, such as a building.

Addresses, on the other hand, are typically a means of finding a

location. As a result, multiple Addresses may point to one Location:

for example, the “third house on the left” is the same location as

#10 Long Street. “Where” entities are associated with a number of

other business entities, including Parties, Interactions, Resources,

Services, Products etc.

Why: “Why” is the reason or trigger for an interaction. An Interaction

is an activity between parties – such as a customer placing a VOD

order or the VOD order being played out (in this case, this would

be considered two interactions). Interactions commonly also involve

Products, Service, Locations, Resources etc. They can also take

the form of contracts or communications.

When: “When” is simply the timing of an interaction. A number

of core business entities, such as Party and Interaction, represent

abstract concepts. Specialised child subclasses are in turn defined

underneath them, and inherit the behaviours, attributes and

associations of the Core Business Entity.

The materiality scoreA new Business Information Architecture, which implements

these concepts, is based on a unique technical capability - it can

normalise and correlate data from multiple data sources within the

Cable TV service delivery infrastructure. This enables operators to

quantitatively compare and measure different risks.

In Cable TV operations, the architecture clearly demonstrates

immediate value with its ability to import and correlate data from

multiple sources (such as telemetry, customer databases, service

reports, trouble tickets, network events etc.). Data correlation

enables it to pinpoint cross-departmental and enterprise-wide

infrastructure issues that are negatively impacting the customer

experience.

As mentioned, the architecture uses a unique scoring approach

that measures the “materiality” of events based on either actual

financial costs to the business or reputational costs, a formula

based upon events that adversely impact the customer experience.

The materiality score can highlight events that don’t meet typical

thresholds for identification or mitigation but that, in total, have

significant impact on the business.

The more data collected, the more accurate the score. Additionally,

the more data collected, the more likely the system is to detect

problems before they cross thresholds and are noticed by operators.

Information architectures in the cable industry

A number of alternative information and data

models (and model fragments) are commonly

used in the Cable and Telecommunications

industry today. This includes efforts from fora such

as the International Telecommunications Union

(ITU); the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF);

the Internet Protocol Detail Record Organisation

(iPDR.org); the TeleManagement Forum; the

Object Management Group (OMG); the DMTF

(Distributed Management Task Force); the T1M1

committee of the Alliance for Telecommunications

Industry Solutions (ATIS); the OSS through Java

Initiative (OSS/J) and others who have developed

models and model fragments.

These models form the basis of systems’

interoperability, but the sheer variety of available

models highlights the need for a standardised

information architecture to unite these industry

models.

The TeleManagement Forum’s Shared Information

and Data Modelling team (SID) is a core model

that represents one such effort. It has gained

acceptance within the communications and

information services industry. In particular, the

ITU/T1M1 use the SID as a source for its Global

Telecom Data Dictionary (GTDD) and the OMG’s

Telecom Domain Task Force configuration-

independent model is based on a SID foundation.

The SID is fundamentally an Information Model.

It is a representation of business concepts, their

characteristics and relationships, described in

an implementation-independent manner. It offers

an information reference model with a common

vocabulary that can be leveraged between

systems and businesses.

These entities are typically packaged and

documented via UML models. The presentation is

in the form of a layered framework that partitions

the shared information and data into eight high-

level domains. These domains are broadly aligned

with eTOM.


l Identity / Party (who)

l Individuals and Organisations

l Customer (actual or potential)

l Supplier

l User

l Time & Time Period (when)

l Calendar

l Places / Locations (where)

l Locations and Sites

l Addresses

l Motivation (why)

l Business Planning

l Work (how)

l Plan and Project

l Process

l Policy (how)

l The Business (what)

l Agreement and Contract

l Product

l Service

l Resource

l Event (when)

l Financials (what)

decision-making. It runs as a VMware virtual machine and, as

such, requires minimal or no hardware infrastructure.

The domain expertise embedded in Adapters for collection and

abstraction of data sources is proprietary and distinguishes it

from generic business intelligence solutions.

The Adapters connect to data sources such as ticketing

systems (such as Remedy), billing systems, telemetry systems

(such as ARRIS ServAssure) and WFM systems (such as

ARRIS WorkAssure) etc. The data contains issues gathered

from customer support calls; premises and plant truck rolls;

telemetry; NOC alarms etc. The net result is a time-based

snapshot of business performance.

The data records are parsed, classified, weighted, stored,

correlated and later presented through a user interface or a

text file generated by the system.

The metrics imported into the architecture are scalable over

time. Since the Data Source Adapters are written in PERL,

Example entities

Figure 4. This is a typical report showing streets ranked according to their actual financial cost to operate over a 7-day period. The key to colours and metrics is shown at the bottom of the screen, along with the mathematical definitions for Count, Financial Cost and Reputational Cost. Conn Calls refers to the number of Customer Calls related to Connectivity.

technicaltechnical

a problem as well as the impact that this problem would

cause. The architecture was designed to address the reality

that the same risks have multiple impacts on the business.

DifferentiatorsThe architecture distinguishes itself in several ways:

l It takes a typical risk conversation from a technical to

a business level, based upon the materiality of adverse

business outcomes.

l The analytics, while based upon standards, have been

extended to accommodate senior executives by including

impact values and classifications. These include the

aforementioned financial and reputational risks, as well as

analytics describing the geographic centre of issues and

organisational views.

l It considers both the raw score of each vulnerability and the

business role of the asset on which it exists. This mapping is

critical, since the same vulnerability on a desktop or on a server,

for example, might have a very different business impact.

l The visualisation engine, which employs a “radar chart”-

style user interface is innovative and allows users to quickly

isolate “outliers”. Outliers can be vulnerabilities that drive

disproportionate total risk, those with unusual profiles etc.

l The correlation engine allows multiple data sources to be

used to more thoroughly identify key drivers of risk, and

“normalises” data to allow quantitative comparisons of risk

across different tools.

Solution architecture The architecture is a lightweight, highly extensible platform for

fact-based, scalable, repeatable business risk analytics and

Figure 3. Radar charts display the most material risks as the farthest from the centre. In this case, the chart shows material risks according to various geographies.


technicaltechnical

Rev2 Networks is a thought-leading Business Risk Analytics™

provider focused on delivering solutions that improve

business performance. Its patent-pending RiskView® Risk

Concentration Analysis™ framework offers the ability to

identify, compare and quantify vulnerabilities across the entire

enterprise before they impact business performance.

By correlating and weighting existing risk data from sources

throughout your infrastructure, the RiskView Business Risk

Analytics® solution identifies hidden issues that are costing

you the most money and causing your customers the most

pain – before they snowball out of control.

RiskView identifies the materiality of risks according to

their potential impact on business performance, helping

customers to prioritise and schedule business process

improvement, problem resolution and overall spending.

RiskView outcomes typically include reduced organisational

risk profile; reduced OpEx; improved customer experience

and competitive advantage.

they are extensible to rapidly support new data sources as

they become available. Real-world customers are importing

hundreds of gigabytes of data into the Data Warehouse.

In addition, the architecture has been extended to

automatically collect telemetry and workforce management

data and to automatically generate and open new tickets for

the field service team that rank issues according to materiality.

By enabling field service to address network issues before

they impact more customers, the architecture is saving

operational and support costs and improving overall customer

experience.

About Rev2 Networks

Cable Information Architecture_SCTE_Nov14

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