Page 368 - Handbook of Modern Telecommunications

Network Management and Administration 3-159

TABl E 3.6.4 Summary of Principal Processes Used in the Practice of eTOM (Continued)
Process or Function Name Definition
Service Planning and Development This process grouping focuses on planning, developing, and delivering services to
Process the Operations domain. It includes processes necessary for defining the strategies
for service creation and design, managing existing services, and ensuring that
capabilities are in place to meet future service demand.
Service Creation Process of creating and testing new or advanced services on the basis of the existing
infrastructure of the service providers
Service Activation, Provisioning, Process of allocating equipment, assigning numbers, and activating circuits or ports
and Assignment at switches and activating customer services.
Service Configuration and This process encompasses the installation and/or configuration of services for
Activation specific customers, including the installation/configuration of customer premises
equipment (CPE). It also supports the reconfiguration of service (either due to
customer demand or problem resolution) after the initial service installation. The
aim is to correctly provide service configuration within the time frame required to
meet ever-decreasing intervals.
Service Activation This process is part of the fulfillment process on those services that require specific
custom design or topology changes. These are typically complex business services
that can include service to multiple users and locations, and possibly multiple
service elements. As a simple example, imagine a typical business requirement for
VPN services between two or more locations. Historically the design of these paths
to enable the service was planned by engineering planning departments and the
service assigned/enabled manually.
Service Problem Management The Service Problem Management process is to respond immediately to customer-
affecting service problems or failures in order to minimize their effects on
customers, and to invoke the restoration of the service, or provide an alternate
service as soon as possible. They encompass the reporting of problems, making a
temporary fix or work-around, isolating the root cause and finally recovering the
complete functionality of the service and providing information for future
enhancements.
Service Quality Management Service Quality Monitoring (SQM) and impact analysis applications are designed to
allow operators to determine what levels of service they are delivering to their
customers. Ideally these take a customer-centric view, i.e. the quality of service
perceived by customers but may measure additional service metrics to allow the
operator to be aware of approaching problems or degradations to service. Impact
analysis applications extend this capability to predict the likely impact of service
degradations or network problems on specific customers.
Service-Level Agreement SLA Management uses the output of the SQM applications to provide a
Management comprehensive view of the level of service provided to customers compared to
pre-agreed, often contractually binding agreements. Typically SLA agreements will
be negotiated between operator and customer to measure a variety of service-
oriented issues and impacts. These may be either stated in terms of service
characteristics or in terms of the business impacts on the customer.
Service Assurance Allows continuous supervision of service-level agreements on service indicators,
such as availability, throughput, call congestion, packet losses, CDR losses, and
others. For violations, the billing module is informed to initiate discounts or
reimbursements.
Service Operations This term is often used instead of Service Assurance.
Resource Management & Resource Management & Operations functional processes maintain knowledge of
Operations (RM&O) resources (application, computing, and network infrastructures) and is responsible
for managing all these resources (e.g., networks, IT systems, servers, routers, etc.)
utilized to deliver and support services required by or proposed to customers.
Network and Systems Management Very often used as a synonym for Resource Management & Operations (RM&O).
Continued