A unified operating environment for customer servicing

The authors present an operating environment for customer servicing, describing a platform and guidelines for consistent development of integrated end-to-end servicing. The environment covers all aspects of end-to-end operations, administration, and maintenance. Driven by customer needs, competition, technology, and the operations center evolution, the environment builds on the foundation of the Unified Network Management Architecture to define service-driven functional requirements for network elements and operations support systems (OSS) used by the AT&T Network Services Division. The end-to-end environment includes customer premises equipment, the core interexchange network, and local exchange carrier access. An internal version of the ACCUMASTER Integrator is a key element of the integrated OS architecture. A working prototype, the integrated testing prototype, built for near-term study of the integrated testing portion of the architecture, has yielded good feedback from customers and work-center staff