A value chain is a progression of activities that a business or firm performs in order to deliver goods and services of value to an end customer. The concept comes from the field of business management and was first described by Michael Porter in his 1985 best-seller, Competitive Advantage: Creating and Sustaining Superior Performance.
The idea of [Porter's Value Chain] is based on the process view of organizations, the idea of seeing a manufacturing organization as a system, made up of subsystems each with inputs, transformation processes and outputs. Inputs, transformation processes, and outputs involve the acquisition and consumption of resources – money, labour, materials, equipment, buildings, land, administration and management. How value chain activities are carried out determines costs and affects profits.
FCAPS is the ISO Telecommunications Management Network model and framework for network management. FCAPS is an acronym for fault, configuration, accounting, performance, security, the management categories into which the ISO model defines network management tasks. In non-billing organizations accounting is sometimes replaced with administration.
The Telecommunications Management Network is a protocol model defined by ITU-T for managing open systems in a communications network. It is part of the ITU-T Recommendation series M.3000 and is based on the OSI management specifications in ITU-T Recommendation series X.700.
Information technology service management (ITSM) are the activities performed by an organization to design, build, deliver, operate and control information technology (IT) services offered to customers.
The Application Services Library (ASL) is a public domain framework of best practices used to standardize processes within Application Management, the discipline of producing and maintaining information systems and applications. The term "library" is used because ASL is presented as a set of books describing best practices from the IT industry.
Microsoft Operations Framework (MOF) 4.0 is a series of guides aimed at helping information technology (IT) professionals establish and implement reliable, cost-effective services.
IT portfolio management is the application of systematic management to the investments, projects and activities of enterprise Information Technology (IT) departments. Examples of IT portfolios would be planned initiatives, projects, and ongoing IT services. The promise of IT portfolio management is the quantification of previously informal IT efforts, enabling measurement and objective evaluation of investment scenarios.
Frameworx is an enterprise architecture framework geared towards communications service providers.
An operating model is both an abstract and visual representation (model) of how an organization delivers value to its customers or beneficiaries as well as how an organization actually runs itself.
TM Forum is a global industry association for service providers and their suppliers in the telecommunications industry. Members include communications and digital service providers, telephone companies, cable operators, network operators, cloud providers, digital infrastructure providers, software suppliers, equipment suppliers, systems integrators, and management consultancies. The Forum has 800+ member companies that collectively generate US$ 2 trillion in revenue and serve 5 billion customers across 111 countries.
Oblicore, Inc. is a US-based provider of service level management software built around the ITIL v3 framework. The company was founded in 2000 to address the burgeoning Service Level Management and Business Services Markets. Oblicore Guarantee (TM), their flagship product provides Service Catalog Management, Service Level Management, and Financial Management for service providers, enterprises, and IT Vendor Managers. They also offer Incident Impact Management for Service Desks. The company's research and development office is located in Tel Aviv, Israel.
Team service management (TSM) is an open-source management framework that uses and integrates existing management methods and techniques to help teams deliver ever improving services. TSM is designed to be used by any and all teams within an enterprise including sales, production, administration, IT, finance and management teams.
A definitive media library is a secure information technology repository in which an organisation's definitive, authorised versions of software media are stored and protected. Before an organisation releases any new or changed application software into its operational environment, any such software should be fully tested and quality assured. The definitive media library provides the storage area for software objects ready for deployment and should only contain master copies of controlled software media configuration items (CIs) that have passed appropriate quality assurance checks, typically including both procured and bespoke application and gold build source code and executables. In the context of the ITIL best practice framework, the term definitive media library supersedes the term definitive software library referred to prior to version ITIL v3.
Operations support systems (OSS), operational support systems in British usage, or Operation System (OpS) in NTT, are computer systems used by telecommunications service providers to manage their networks. They support management functions such as network inventory, service provisioning, network configuration and fault management.
Network functions virtualization (NFV) is a network architecture concept that leverages IT virtualization technologies to virtualize entire classes of network node functions into building blocks that may connect, or chain together, to create and deliver communication services.
A mobile virtual network enabler (MVNE) is a company that provides network infrastructure and related services, such as business support systems, administration, and operations support systems to a mobile virtual network operator (MVNO). This enables MVNOs to offer services to their own customers with their own brands. The MVNE does not have a relationship with consumers, but rather is a provider of network enablement platforms and services.
Service Integration and Management (SIAM) is an approach to managing multiple suppliers of services and integrating them to provide a single business-facing IT organization. It aims at seamlessly integrating interdependent services from various internal and external service providers into end-to-end services in order to meet business requirements.
Tudor IT Process Assessment (TIPA) is a methodological framework for process assessment. Its first version was published in 2003 by the Public Research Centre Henri Tudor based in Luxembourg. TIPA is now a registered trademark of the Luxembourg Institute of Science and Technology (LIST). TIPA offers a structured approach to determine process capability compared to recognized best practices. TIPA also supports process improvement by providing a gap analysis and proposing improvement recommendations.
The Service Design Package (SDP) contains the core documentation of a service and is attached to its entry in the ITIL Service Portfolio.
The Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) is a set of practices and a framework for IT activities such as IT service management (ITSM) and IT asset management (ITAM) that focus on aligning IT services with the needs of the business.
