TMForum Frameworx(NGOSS), defines 4 views. These are different perspectives for looking at a service providers’ challenges and how to solve them.
First one is the “Business View”. Business View, focuses on the business and try to define and scope the business problem/ business case to be solved. A business problem may be “implementing trouble management in order to increase operational efficiency”, “adding self ordering capabilities to the current order to cash process” or just “Decrease the OPEX”.
Business View’s main stakeholders are business analysts and sponsors(mostly managers). Business analysts will;
- Capture the requirements
- Define the use cases
- Define the processes to fulfill these use cases
- Define the business objects, manipulated by these processes.
- Generate business workflows.
- Define the roles
In constructing a business case, the main activity for the business analyst would be defining the process descriptions and their information/data requirements. Here, business analyst can find all the relevant information from eTOM, Business Process Framework. For this reason, eTOM is mapped to the Business View. The case documentation (and also eTOM) references to business entities to be manipulated by these business processes. SID defines the business glossary. From this perspective, SID is also involved in the business view.
Business view is technology neutral and does not point to any technology specific topics.
The second view, “System View” looks at the business problem from more technical perspective. However, it is still technology neutral. IT Architects and Enterprise Architects are the main actors looking from the System View. SID is the main player in here. But the “I” part of it. It providers an Information Model explaining how several business entities are related to each other. SID uses UML to explain those associations, and cardinalities between the business entities.
The “D” part, data model will come at the next view, “Implementation View”. Implementation View is the view that the developers and system integrators look from. Here it is technology (J2EE, .NET, CORBA, DCOM etc.) and application specific (IBM x, HP y,etc.) areas that is the main concern of these stakeholders. Data Model is also in here, a solution specific look at the data that was defined in the system view. The Interfaces that are required for communicating with other applications are defined in here. The Data Model is also used to define the structure of these interfaces (and the databases).
Finally, the solution is developed/customized and ready to be deployed on the site. Here, “Deployment View” begins. IT Operators deploy the solution on the servers and start monitoring them. They manage the whole life cycle of the solution. In the mean time, business users are using the system and providing feedbacks about the efficiency of the solution.
It is important to note that Business View and System View are not “visible” when we went into the production environment. What we will see would be workflows that represent business processes and databases /technology specific distributed objects that represent the business entities. For this reason, the “hidden” views (Business and System) are called logical views while the “visible” ones (Implementation and Deployment) are called Physical Views.