Talking about routines in the field: the emergence of organizational capabilities in a new cellular phone network company

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From Bureaucracy to Enterprise? The Changing Jobs and Careers of Managers in Telecommunications Service

This paper analyzes how organizational restructuring is affecting managerial labor markets. Drawing on field research from several Bell operating companies plus a detailed survey of managers in one company, this paper considers how organizational restructuring affects the employment levels, the nature of work, and the career trajectories of lower and middle level line managers. Does restructuring lead to a loss or managerial power and a convergence in the working conditions of managerial and nonmanagerial workers? Or, conversely, do managers stand to gain from the flattening of hierarchies and devolution of decision-making to lower organizational levels? The paper\u27s central argument is that a new vision of organization has taken hold – one that replaces bureaucracy with enterprise. This vision, however, entails sharp contradictions because it relies on two competing approaches to organizational reform: one that relies on decentralizing management to lower levels to enhance customer responsiveness; the other that relies on reengineering and downsizing to realize scale economies. While the first approach views lower and middle managers as central to competitiveness, the second views them as indirect costs to be minimized. The central question is whether or how the two approaches can be reconciled. The evidence from this case study shows that restructuring has had the unintended consequence of creating new organizational cleavages: between lower and middle level managers on the one hand, and top managers on the other

Reference Process Flows for Telecommunication Companies - An Extension of the eTOM Model

The telecommunication market is experiencing substantial changes. New business models, innovative services, and technologies require reengineering, transformation, and process standardization. Enterprise Architecture Frameworks support the transformation by specifying methods, procedures, and reference models. With the Enhanced Telecom Operation Map (eTOM), the TM Forum offers an international de facto reference process framework, based on specific features and requirements of the telecommunication industry. However, this reference framework only offers a hierarchical collection of processes on different levels of abstraction; a control view in terms of a sequential ordering of tasks and hence a real process flow as well as an end-to-end view on the customer are missing. In this paper, we extend the eTOM reference model by reference process flows, in which we abstract and generalize the knowledge about processes in telecommunication companies. With reference process flows, we aim to assist companies in achieving a structured and transparent re-structuring and re-design of their processes. We demonstrate the applicability and usefulness of our reference process flows in two case studies, and evaluate them by means of criteria for reference model evaluation. Our reference process flows have been accepted as a standard by the TM Forum and published as part of eTOM version 9. We further elaborate on those components of our approach which can be applied outside the telecommunication industry

Supporting Telecommunication Alarm Management System with Trouble Ticket Prediction

Fault alarm data emanated from heterogeneous telecommunication network services and infrastructures are exploding with network expansions. Managing and tracking the alarms with Trouble Tickets using manual or expert rule- based methods has become challenging due to increase in the complexity of Alarm Management Systems and demand for deployment of highly trained experts. As the size and complexity of networks hike immensely, identifying semantically identical alarms, generated from heterogeneous network elements from diverse vendors, with data-driven methodologies has become imperative to enhance efficiency. In this paper, a data-driven Trouble Ticket prediction models are proposed to leverage Alarm Management Systems. To improve performance, feature extraction, using a sliding time-window and feature engineering, from related history alarm streams is also introduced. The models were trained and validated with a data-set provided by the largest telecommunication provider in Italy. The experimental results showed the promising efficacy of the proposed approach in suppressing false positive alarms with Trouble Ticket prediction