By Barbara Lancaster

Back in 1987, some creative telecommunications IT types, and one very frustrated DBA, had an idea: what if we designed a corporate Product Catalog, sat it in the middle of a suite of OSS/BSS application modules, and only allowed communication between those modules through the Product Catalog data base? Every customer request would pick up only the parameters that existed in the Product Catalog to create Customer Product; Provisioning would see exactly which components from which vendors were required to fulfill the customer's request, to create Service Product and Billing could look up exactly what it needed to get the invoices calculated accurately – no out of date rates, no bundling errors, to create Customer Billed Product.

This small group was able to build that vision for a Greenfield implementation in a far off land. And it worked – each business functional team was happy to be able to specify the data that they needed to get their jobs done, yet not having to be responsible for the data that other groups needed. Sure there were some heated debates as definitions of commonly-required data elements were wrestled to the ground, but in less than eighteen months, an entirely new OSS/BSS environment was defined, built, and in production.

With this positive experience under their belts, the little team was back home in North America and thought "there must be a way to use the same philosophy to make things work better here." They were once again trying to find a way out of always being seen as the bottleneck. You know, being that one group Product Managers could point to every time and say, "They can't get my new mega profit generator to market for at least a year!" These courageous OSS/BSS veterans knew that the bottleneck was not really all their fault, but rather a complicated mess, and an ironic one at that: the combination of stove pipe systems and mammoth monolithic

yielded a mean pencil and paper. They knew who to call to get any customer problem fixed and relied on relationships to make things work, rather than on computer systems. They loved their Product Handbook, a book with dozens of tabs organizing hundreds of pages listing thousands of products, with enough asterisks and foot notes to make a normal person's head spin. But...these were no normal people; they were extreme subject matter experts. So, they rejected the stand alone computerized Product Catalog, simply refusing to use it. And they were right to do so. The tool simply did not have sufficient functionality to be the comprehensive active