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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 entities
To 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

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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 overview
The 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 score
A 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.

3. 62 63Vol. 36 No. 4 - November 2014 Issue Vol. 36 No. 4 - November 2014 Issue
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.
Differentiators
The 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.

4. 64 65Vol. 36 No. 4 - November 2014 Issue Vol. 36 No. 4 - November 2014 Issue
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