PDF of this tutorialNo service management system can manage everything, however. The service provider now needs to integrate the customer-aware knowledge base and service management tools with surrounding OSSs, including the customer-facing systems, sometimes called business support systems. The most effective way to do this is by using application programming interfaces (APIs) and extensible markup language (XML) interfaces.
Through the API, a service provider can export alert information to a trouble-ticketing system. Likewise, service-usage and SLA–related information can be sent to the billing system. Event and alert information can be reported to a central fault management system. In much the same manner, an inventory system can receive data on network elements, port cards, ports, and trunk links.
The flow of information can go both ways. For example, a customer-facing order-management system can feed information into the customer-aware provisioning system. There, the order-management system provides customer data that starts the correlation between customer, network, and service, which becomes vital for service management later.
In fact, once the service management system can slice out the data relating to one specific customer, the service provider can take the next logical step. They can let customers provision services themselves. In such a scenario, the customer can see only the network data pertaining to them. Then, for example, the customer can up the bandwidth for two hours to support a videoconference. Through the APIs, this change is reported to all functional areas, such as billing, performance monitoring, and fault management.
