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relationships between the systems involved every time a customer makes a change to their service plan. A product manager won’t fully understand which technical changes need to be made to alter the service, and an IT engineer won’t fully understand the business demands that necessitate such changes. With CAD and CAM principles, service providers would be able to automate a massive portion of their processes and keep production in line with customer demand.

To date, SPs main obstacle in moving forward on this front has been the lack of a standards-body on which to base these changes. Standards would allow operators to streamline their service creation environments, as the requirements for implementing the necessary changes would be clearly defined. Without them, SPs remain vulnerable to the chronic problems that currently hinder rapid and effective service creation as they stumble through the implementation of new services based on new technologies.

down, and the gap between IT engineers and product managers would be bridged. To make this change, the core of the architecture would need to be flexible, automated and adaptive, characteristics that are best embodied by the concept of an ‘active catalog’. In broad terms, an active catalog more closely couples the processes of service design, creation and execution by deconstructing every piece of data in a service provider’s product catalog into a component library made up of “building blocks” of information. Each component would be made aware of how it must interact with every other component in the catalog, and understand the necessary dependencies, prerequisites or exclusions that must be

Furthermore, a standard-based approach would allow SPs to deploy a consistent product portfolio across all business applications, while reducing the complexity of developing new products. Product marketers could design as well as create new services, and overall operating costs would be lowered. In turn, customers would be able to purchase these new products at a lower cost, and with additional access to a much richer set of personalized services and control options.

The Way IT Should Be

Ideally, this standard architecture would center on the design of a new type of service creation environment and would more closely mimic an assembly line approach to new product definition and creation. Incumbent language barriers between departments would need to be broken .........

addressed for the connection between each to take place. Perhaps most importantly, though, each component would become reusable.

With these building blocks available in the active catalog, the final piece of the architecture is an XML/web-based graphic interface that would publish the details of the components contained within the active catalog. This connector platform, combined with the functionality of the active catalog, would provide marketing professionals and IT departments with a powerful tool. Product managers and marketers would be able to design new services and components and bypass the time-consuming IT testing phase. IT engineers will be given the power to access a list of proven business functions to push new component use and development throughout their networks.

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