outages in the network. Without full transparency across all hierarchies and dependencies, it is not possible to determine immediately the impacted services and customers. Therefore, implementing a new inventory management system is necessary, one that can consolidate the different legacy tools into one hybrid infrastructure data model and provide a holistic, end-to-end view across all dependencies.

Choosing the right
infrastructure management solution

To overcome these challenges and successfully meet the changing requirements of the digital world, CSPs must utilize a comprehensive database of all assets, resources, connections, and dependencies to feed their planning, operations, and service assurance and fulfillment processes.

A unified resource management solution across the hybrid infrastructure network will provide greater visibility into digital infrastructure, eliminate data silos, and improve data quality throughout the organization. Ideally, CSPs should look for a management solution with an open architecture and standard interfaces to expose data to other systems. The following features and capabilities are key success factors to look for.

Real-time inventory

An accurate and up-to-date inventory of all physical, logical, and virtual network and service resources will improve the utilization of all network resources and enable CSPs to make confident decisions about how to plan, build, deploy and manage the business. High-performance data reconciliation and delta calculation mechanisms are required to synchronize with the network to keep data accurate.

Process integration

As-is documentation of network resources and the planning of changes, transformations, and rollouts must be closely linked and integrated. This requires that planning data is always based on as-is data and that workflow integration manages the relevant processes and ensures that status changes in the planning process are directly reflected in the as-is documentation for the next planning iteration.

Geographical mapping

GIS capabilities can improve operational efficiency and add location intelligence to the different use cases.

Data sharing

A unified resource management solution must provide this data to all other relevant IT and OSS systems, which need specific parts for the different operational use cases. Therefore the solution should feature an open architecture, with standard interfaces to expose data to other systems, and be adaptable to fit unique scenarios and environments.

Comprehensive reporting

Real-time reporting and dashboarding are needed to ensure all legal and compliance regulations are met, to support capacity management use cases, and to provide comprehensive reporting for all relevant fulfillment and assurance use cases.

As communication service providers upgrade and transform networks, roll out new technologies such as 5G, and lay new fiber to keep pace with digital transformation, full transparency into all network resources with all the dependencies across all hierarchies is business critical. A fully integrated GIS tool can provide the expanded functionality CSPs need. The combination of location intelligence with network infrastructure details will enable smarter decisions about network capacity and resiliency, improve network design and planning, and support many other use cases to ensure that networks are optimized to handle the demands of the digital world.

To significantly minimize errors and manual reworks, it’s important to use accurate as-is documentation to automate processes such as design, planning, and rollout phases.