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Service Management Lessons Learned |
Communication Service Providers (CSPs) are struggling with service and resource management.
The term �Service Management� is a broad term that can mean many things to many different organizations.
Each Independent Software Vendor (ISV) and System Integrator (SI) has a different view of "Service Management".
"Service Management" can mean IT (Information Technology) or Communication Service Provider (CSP) services, depending on the speaker�s perspective.
Functionally "Service Management" can be monitoring the availability of a service, testing the service, and/or activating the service.
Standards are being adopted such as OSS/J, SID, and eTOM to define these Service Management processes and dataflows. These standards are slowly being adopted but are not yet widespread.
Add to that the �Services Explosion� as CSPs search for greater ARPU (Average Revenue Per User).
This can often lead to confusion when trying to define and scope a Service Management implementation. Various questions need to be answered before moving forward with a Service Management solution and before introducing another system into your operations.
1. What services are to be managed?
2. What data sources and resources support these services?
3. Who will operationally leverage the new Service Management solution?
4. What are the Service Management Drivers? (eg. Business vs. non-Business customers, service bundles, SLA penalties, etc.)
Understanding the problem, user needs, and defining the expected outcome for the entire organization will go a long way in deploying a successful Service Management solution.
For success, it is critical that the Service Management solution be deployed with a focus not just on the Operational Support System (OSS) technology, but there is also a need to have a cohesive understanding of the problem and requirements before deploying a Service Management solution.
In Fault Management there was more room for a "brute force" alert and event consolidation system with or without root cause correlation and with or without a network topology. Without automated correlations across a topology model the Fault Management system pushed all the work onto the human operator to filter on specific alerts in the Network Operations Center (NOC).
In Service Management, the brute-force Fault Management method will fail. Think through, not just the OSS technology, but also what should be managed, how it should be managed, and when it should be managed.
Are you dealing with Service Management challenges? Consider Longview Software in your next Service Management project.
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