Frameworx

Frameworx is an enterprise architecture framework geared towards communications service providers.

Frameworx consists of four frameworks: The Information Framework (formally Shared Information/Data Model or SID) is a unified reference data model providing a single set of terms for business objects in telecommunications.

The Information Framework uses Unified Modeling Language to formalize the expression of the needs of a particular stakeholder viewpoint.

The Information Framework provides the common language for communicating the concerns of the four major groups of constituents (stakeholders) represented by the Frameworx Viewpoints - Business, System, Implementation and Deployment, as defined in the Frameworx Lifecycle.

The Information Framework model takes inspiration from a wide variety of industry sources, but its principal origins are the Alliance Common Information Architecture (ACIA) created by a team led by Bill Brook from AT&T and BT Group and the Directory Enabled Networks - next generation (DEN-ng) model created by John Strassner.

When initially released in 2000, the Information Framework model covered the business (BSS) arena well, and also the device management field well, but was insufficient in its ability to represent logical networks and capacity.

The Frameworx certification methodologies help us deal with the scope of preferences that are not linearly distributed as an opening to improve the customer accepted undeniably appropriate method.

Taken to extreme, this can sometimes be viewed as producing the ability to "plug and play" applications, where they are so independent that they can be changed without affecting the overall system behaviour.

But imagine the difficulty that would occur if the ordering application worked on products that consists of bundles of sub-products (e.g. a broadband access product made from a copper line, a modem, a set of filters and a broadband conversion), whereas the billing application only expected single product/order lines.

A single information model for data that is shared between applications in this way provides a solution to this problem.

However, during the early 1990s it became apparent that employing these as purely isolated applications was highly inefficient, since it led to a situation where, for example, orders would be taken on one system but the details would then need to be re-keyed into another in order to configure the relevant network equipment.

However, for large operators with many hundreds of separate OSSs, the proliferation of interfaces became a serious problem.

Frameworx contracts can be seen as extensions of Application Programming Interface (API) specifications.

The eTOM (enhanced Telecom Operations Map, pronounced ee-tom) is the Frameworx business process framework.