In the previous posting I described the Product Model within SID. In this posting I will introduce another the other strengths of the TeleManagement Forums’ Shared Information/Data Model (SID), namely the Party Role concept
SID makes a very clear distinction between the roles played by Parties (Businesses, Organisations and People) and the Parties themselves. This can seem to be very pedantic and clumsy when first viewing the SID, so why does the SID do it?
A Party Role, defined in the SID as “The part played by a party in a given context with any characteristics, such as expected pattern of behaviour, attributes, and/or associations that it entails.” This is pretty obscure. It is better to realise there are real world entities such as People and Businesses that exist independently of the Telecoms company are Parties. When a party interacts with us he/she/it plays a role and it is the role the party is playing we see. How we address the party, the functions we allow the party to perform depend, not on the party, but the role he/she/it is playing. For example, a person can be an employee, a customer, and the user of a service. As an employee we allow him or her to modify prices list entries in the Order Management system for example, but we would not allow a customer to do this. So a Party when playing the role of Employee can do things that he/she cannot do when playing the role of Customer.
The simplest way of visualising this is to consider the Party Role to be a mask worn by the Party. The Party Role mask carries on it the information we know about the Party as well as defining the Party Role Type (Employee, Customer, Registered End User) which allows us to identify the range of functions that Party can perform when in that Party Role.
If the Party Role concept is taken to its logical conclusion and (somehow) every Party Role is connected to the correct Party and all the Parties are completely deduped then the Holy Grail of CRM, a single view of the Customer can be achieved, though the reality is that this is a complex and expensive task.
Two key Party Roles have been mentioned that need to be further discussed: Customer and Registered End User.
The word Customer is widely used and abused and everyone has their own mental image of what the word means. The OED Defines Customer as “Buyer; client of bank; (colloq.) queer, awkward etc. ~ (person to be dealt with)” not a very useful definition that covers a broad set of behaviours and allowed functions. In the SID the Customer is defined as “A Person or Organisation that buys or has bought or otherwise obtained Products, Resources and/or Services from the enterpries or receives free offers for Products, Resources and/or Services. This definition is also very broad. In my experience the best definition of Customer is “The Role Played by the Party in which the Party takes financial and contractual obligation for an Account”. This is a much narrower definition than that used by CRM but allows a clear definition of the functions allowed by this Role.
So if the Customer is the Party Role that is responsible for the account who is the user of the Telecoms services? Within SID this is not clearly defined. I have developed the concept of the “End User” Party Role which I define as the role played by a party when using a Product (Subscription).
By using Party Roles the SID allows the Telecoms provider to understand why the same Parties are treated differently in different circumstances and the difference between real-world parties and the company’s subjective view of these parties.
1 comment:
This concept is easier to understand when you look together at the SID and the eTOM (two of the NGOSS framework artifacts). Role implies action or relationship whereas Party implies the core taking on that role. The role arises from a relationship established through an eTOM defined process.
Your mask analogy is good but it misses the action component. This Party/Role originates from the theater: An actor is the party who takes on a role in the context of the play. The actor is not the role, but the audience sees only the actor in the role. Yet actor, itself, is a role the person takes on as part of a career. This is similar to the dichotomy in the pattern Specification and Instance, but the semantics are different.
Your definition of customer is IMHO, just one role a party may take on. Remember the separation of the Customer and the use of a service is explicit. A customer (with your definition) might be the parent in a family all of whom have mobile phones under a family plan. However, the relationships can get complex and must all be modeled. With the Family Plan, each family member draws inventory and uses services, but the customer account remains with one parent. But one kid may have a separate customer relationship by maintaining their own ISP account at their university domicile. Each family member is a Party, each having different and multiple roles with associated and non associated activities and relationships.
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