thumb|upright=1.6 |An early version of the process model
The Business Process Framework is an operating model framework for telecom service providers in the telecommunications industry. The model describes the required business processes of service providers and defines key elements and how they should interact.
The Business Process Framework (eTOM) is a standard maintained by the TM Forum, The first approved standard was the 'OSI/NM Forum Protocol Specification,' an extension of OSI protocols developed since the late 1970s.
The direct development towards the Business Process Framework (eTOM), as Brenner (2007) explained, was "the Telecom Operation Map (TOM) was first published in 2001. The goal of TOM was the creation of an industry-owned framework of business processes, including the definition of a common enterprise-independent terminology for service management. It was also supposed to serve as a basis for discussing the scope of information management necessary for the execution of the processes. The result of this latter effort has meanwhile spawned its own TMF document family, the Shared Information and Data Model (SID).