This document is an initial draft Guidebook. It provides information on the current situation, highlighting the business problem the industry is facing in this area in creating, deploying and managing the services.

Networks and services are evolving; new technologies are introduced more rapidly than existing ones are retired leading to bigger and more complex networks and services. At the same time there is a greater need for automation and optimisation of business processes. Also, the operator focus is moving from managing the network technologies to managing the end-user service experience, which demands different management solutions. The current mechanisms are having difficulty handling new challenges and at the same time reducing the operating costs.

There is also a window of opportunity for the operators to catch new revenue streams by developing, deploying and managing new feature-rich services - if the right tools are there.

The whole process of service planning, deployment and assurance needs to be easy, quick, systematic and reliable. This calls for efficient and inter-working tools in the service creation, deployment and assurance areas. There are issues that need to be solved in these areas to boost the service take-up in the industry.

This initial release looks at crucial business problems in the service planning, deployment and assurance value chain. The analysis will lead to a set of proposals that will eventually provide a mapping of the business requirements to NGOSS implementation using a common service framework, i.e., map the user perspective to an NGOSS process and data model.