Three Keys to Developing and Integrating Telecommunications Service Management Systems zy Vincent P. Wade, Trinity College Dublin David Lewis, University College London zyxwvuts With the deregulation of the telecommunication industry in ABSTRACT Europe and the United States, communication and information services (e.g., multimedia entertainment services, educational services) are being increas- ingly delivered across value chains of network, service, and value-added service providers. The benefit of such interoperable services is the provision of “one-stop shopping“ in which “tailored” services are delivered without their customers dealing with the multiplicity of underlying telecommunication services and network providers. The difficulty with such delivery chains is the complexity of managing these services across the different provider organizations (i.e., across both administrative and technological domains). These difficul- ties include achieving an understanding of business process across the organizations and the heterogeneity of the components to be (re)used to support these business processes in the organizations. This article examines three crucial elements in ensuring successful and flexible development of such service management systems zyxwvuts - namely, a development pro- cess which is customized to support management system component development and component reuse; the development of business models capable of representing the under- lying business processes for these systems; and an integration strategy designed to assist the flexible and timely cooperation of these management components both within a single organization (single administrative domain) as well as across organizations (multidomain). n the liberalized telecommunications market, I which is occurring in both Europe and the United States, the integration of management functionality is a criti- cal property of operational support systems. Such integration of management systems must occur over multiple organiza- tional and technological boundaries (known as zyxwvutsr multidomain management systems). The scale, heterogeneity, and geograph- ic distribution of network and service management systems across the value chain of network and service providers pre- sent great difficulties in the fulfillment, ensuring, and billing of new services. For example, the Network Management Forum (NMF, recently renamed as TeleManagement Forum, TMF) conducted a survey involving the principal public net- work operators in Europe. It identified the main business drivers for these service providers as cost reduction in provi- sion of services, improved process flow across provider organi- zation management systems, greater management process automation, greater customer management control, improved quality of service zyxwvutsrqp (QoS) management, and greater range of management services. This article concentrates on three key aspects of imple- menting management systems, which address the above requirements, namely: A development process to support the design and imple- mentation of reusable management components An integration technology to allow management compo- nents to be “sequenced” to achieve specific business objectives A representation of business process(es) which describe how specific business objectives are realized The article provides an investigation of the emergent trends for these elements and, based on an analysis of these trends, proposes an integrated approach to realizing successfu mul- tidomain management systems. The proposed three strands consist of a customized management development process, a (workflow-engine-based) integration technology, and a business process modeling technique. Finally, the article draws conclusions based on experience implementing the proposed approach. ELEMENT #I : A DEVELOPMENT PROCESS FOR MANAGEMENT COMPONENTS AND SYSTEMS The ability to easily integrate new or changing business pro- cesses is a very important advantage, which can be exFloited by network operators, service providers, and equipmer t ven- dors. In this complex multidomain situation, the key to inte- gration is to ensure the effective flow of information and controlled interaction between management systems. This requires that the development process adopted by the man- agement system developers support both information flclw and interaction across systems rather than being considered stand- alone applications, as is often the case with existing manage- ment applications. It must be recognized that realization of such large-scale (integrated) management systems relies on the effective reuse of well understood patterns of design, com- ponent designs, and implementations. Effective component reuse techniques are required to realize the widely held indus- try belief that bespoke management systems are too ccstly to develop or maintain and too slow to adapt to changing market needs. TRENDS IN THE DEVELOPMENT OF MANAGEMENT COMPONENTS AND SYSTEMS This section identifies recent significant developmmts in management software engineering. The late ’80s and early ’90s saw a rise in usage of many different object-or ented (00) analysis and design techniques. Principal among the “second generation” of these methodologies are Rumbaugh’s Object Modeling Technique (OMT), Jacobson’s zyx 00 Soft- ___- -- 140 0163-6804/99/$10.00 zyxwvuts 0 1999 IEEE IEEE CommunicationsMagazine May 1999