Designing the Architecture Solution

Designing the architecture solution combines the methodical principles in an architectural construct that offers clear recommendations for the specific challenges facing today’s telecommunications operators. The result is a concrete reference solution that is presented in this chapter. First, the relevant elements are identified and arranged in an architecture structure for organization, processes, data, and applications. As an additional structural element, five industry-specific architecture domains are proposed. These architecture domains provide an overall structure of telecommunications operators. The customer-centric domain covers all architecture elements related to direct customer interactions. All technical specifics are encapsulated in the technology domain. The product domain includes the planning, development, and roll-out of new products. Both the product and the technology domain prepare the prerequisites to fulfill customer requests in the customer-centric domain. Further support activities are included in the customer domain and enterprise support domain. For each of these domains, concrete reference solutions for organization, processes, data, and applications are described and illustrated. These reference solutions combine the industry-specific TM Forum reference models and provide a detailed blueprint for the transformational needs of telecommunications operators. The reference architecture includes a hierarchical decomposition and interrelations between the different elements. Hence, this chapter presents a high-level summary of the reference architecture (cf. Sect. 4.1), an explanation of its structure (cf. Sect. 4.2), and detailed descriptions of the proposed solutions for each domain (cf. Sects. 4.3–4.6).