Healing the OSS Wounds in the MSO

MSOs also need new and enhanced functionality, such as:

• Event correlation that empowers operations to quickly identify root causes of network faults
• Configuration management databases that provide an up-to-date model of the network infrastructure with visibility down to individual software configurations
• Intelligent trouble ticketing for linking trouble tickets with customer and cross-network data, which provides trending to deliver proactive service assurance
• Workforce management to ensure efficient deployment in the field
• Flow-though service assurance to provide up-to-minute outage information to the self-service portal or CSR
• Enhanced inventory management that provides visibility of inventory to support troubleshooting or give firm order commitment dates in business services
• Enhanced monitoring and diagnostics to provide a complete dashboard for end-to-end service management for performance, availability, security and billing

MSOs could use improvements in automated flow-through provisioning, quality management, intelligent network route management and managed home environments.

OSS Transformation: Guiding Principles for Implementation

Given that OSS forms the backbone of an MSO organization, it’s not surprising that a transformation would touch every part of the enterprise. Here are three key considerations for MSOs in planning an OSS transformation:

Systems Transformation

• All installed infrastructure must support some agreed-upon standard for integration. Some companies have implemented a “northbound” standard: all components must be able to communicate with a central data store.
• Applications should pull from a central data warehouse to assure that data is modeled efficiently and without duplication.
• An MSO should consider a middleware layer that can translate data collection to various user groups, while also providing business rules for management and orchestration. Users can identify the information they need to access while OSS development continues. At the same time, data that is collected and stored in the warehouse is available to all user systems that come online. In the long term, this provides all user systems with a common access point for all layers of the OSS.
• Data should be collected using standard and efficient tools (such as SNMP and IPDR) and should be warehoused in common formats and non-proprietary database systems.