AbstractsBusiness Management & Administration

Today’s Telecom sectors’ implementations seem to be sub optimal and might even end up out of control because of the multiple implementation of technological and process functionalities, and dominant financial focus that complicates removing legacy networks. Even though, there is support for fulfilling customer needs, the inefficient use of resources can negatively affect the business activities and profits. The Telecom sectors’ current evolutionary stage requires a thorough evaluation of all its current implementations in order to restructure and consolidate them. In order to maintain the vital telecom contribution to our society and economy, cost optimisations and the ability to keep on innovating in an increasing complex setting, need to be safeguarded. We know that, apart from financial difficulties, there are important handicaps in this sector itself: it has an ill-defined set of functions that has been addressed by different standardisation bodies. This has led to the main research question, namely: How to identify a best of breed model which both reflects the current (2009) and the near future (2012) Telecom sector functionality in order to come up with an advise about optimising its internal functional structure taking into account the relevant requirements concerning interoperability with other sectors? The major objective of this study was to identify both the internal and external functions performed by the Telecom sector and thus reveal how they provide value to the other nodes in the sectors’ network. The Telecom sector (as defined in this document) is the research domain and subject of modelling in this thesis. Accordingly, the functional approach deliberately chosen for this project provides an implementation independent basis of knowledge that could be transferrable from the Telecom sector to other sectors or to different aggregation levels in the economy and society. The functions were extracted from well known and commonly used telecom related models. As a result, from the data mining and analysis applied to those telecom related models, this thesis provides a long list of 331 functions performed by the Telecom sector. In addition, these functions were mapped onto other non-telecom sector specific models that have a sectors’ network applicability in order to confirm the neutrality of the functional perspective. A minority of those functions proved to be Telecom sector specific. In this thesis, we present a proposition to classify functions, taking into account two dimensions: Composition (atomic, composed), and domain of applicability (generic, specific). It is known that the generic-specific dimension has been considered before; however, in this thesis we have included a new dimension atomic-composed. These both dimensions are not exclusively, can be applied at the same time, and are context dependant. One of the models studied in this study, providing a sectors’ network view is the Holon model. This model as well makes use of the fact that natural language can be used to represent…