First steps towards the future TMN: dealing with short term architectural tradeoffs

The authors describe some of the technical solutions being investigated by the Italian Telecommunications Operating Company to allow for the smooth evolution toward an overall management architecture embracing both telecommunication and operating services. They focus on the issues of integration of operations support systems (OSSs) in the Italian Telecommunications Management Network (TMN), depicting a stepwise approach to this integration. The issues included are an approach in terms of a reference architecture; the shortcomings of the current situation of operations and management systems to be tackled at the start of the integration project; and a transition architecture in terms of design changes to existing software as new OSSs that need to access existing OSSs in order to share corporate data are developed