TABLE OF CONTENTS In Chapter 2, we described the process flows related to service management and, in particular, service assurance. The description there is generic and is applicable to any service. However, a number of service assurance aspects in the processes and flows have a lot of commonality with respect to different services. For example, in order to manage a service in such a way that the customer benefits, one has to identify a set of attributes that end users care about. It is desirable that these attributes be defined in such a way that they could be reused for different services and new attributes can be built on top of the defined ones. Such modular and extensible design will save a lot of engineering effort and time in the long run.
The set of desirable end-user attributes also forms the basis of many assurance functions. Service management will then be focused on optimizing this controlled set of customer-focused attributes. We will see later in this chapter that these are the KQIs that will be crucial for service quality assurance.
A key aspect of a service model is to facilitate the automation process and the tedious job of collecting the necessary data for analysis. It also provides an intelligent structure for organizing the collected data and distributing it to support different OSS applications. A desirable service model also contains the right tools to help the operator to look at the relevant information and make an intelligent decision...
