The TeleManagement Forum has mostly been focused on the telecom industry's "internal" IT and operations issues. But the group is in the final stages of putting together a new initiative that will focus on the so-called IT "value chain."

Most BSS/OSS issues are focused on service providers increasing the efficiency of their internal operations and how they deal with their customers. But in a Web 2.0 world where services are often combined from multiple providers, it's just as important to deal with "inter-company" IT issues, said TM Forum Chairman Keith Willetts in an interview (listen to a full podcast of our interview with Willetts).

Willetts didn’t have a formal name for the effort, but said focusing on the “many-to-many” IT challenge – and not just how a telco automates internally – will be a major focus for the forum moving forward.

“We’re putting together a whole set of programs now around the value chain piece,” Willetts said. “Now we’re putting a big red ribbon around [this work] and need to give it a name. We haven’t christened it yet, but we definitely will in the next couple of weeks.”

Details of the new initiative will be discussed at the TM Forum's Management World 2008 show May 18-22 in Nice, France, Willetts said.

The TM Forum has been working on individual pieces of the digital “value chain” question – including delivering framework efforts in areas like device management as well as membership expansion efforts such as the addition of cable MSOs to its mix.

But now, the group is working to launch a more formal working group or initiative to focus on the value chain challenge – and opportunity. That potentially includes creating standards or defining best practices for how service providers share user profile data, deliver user location information and expose APIs that provide access to a variety of telco back-end systems, among other inter-company back-office activities.

For instance, Willetts said he recently talked with an IPTV provider that had 150 different content providers with which they were working. “None of those companies want to hand-craft how they work together.”

Another example is advertising. Delivering ads is easy; coordinating and sharing information to make those ads relevant and profitable is the challenge, Willetts said.

“And there we’ve got a real, real problem because the information -- and telecom companies, particularly mobile companies, hold a lot of extremely valuable information on their users that could be monetized back to advertisers -- but it’s in a myriad of different data formats and a myriad of different systems,” Willetts said. “We have to come to some common agreement on the kind of glue that’s going to make these value chains work. Basic stuff like: how we pass information format from one to another; what format that’s in; how we pay each other; how we pay bits of different things to different people in the value chain; and in particular in advertising how we can provide advertisers with a common set of information that they’re prepared to pay for.”

Such so-called “two-sided” business models -- which have telcos getting revenues from partners rather than end-users -- “turns the telecom industry literally upside down,” Willetts said.