Today’s players in the Information, Communications and Technology (ICT) industry - including service providers and network operators - are facing unprecedented challenges to simultaneously:

· Lower network operations costs;

· Introduce new generation networking equipment faster and with reduced integration tax;

· Introduce new communication services more rapidly and adjust their functionality in response to changing market needs; and,

· Improve customer satisfaction.

Each of these challenges are in and of themselves daunting; however, taken collectively, they require that service providers and network operators address not only the technology that they use for Operations Support Systems but also the way that they specify, develop and deploy those systems. To use a manufacturing analogy, they need to focus not solely on the product, but also the production line and how it is organized and operated.

There is growing consensus that the industry needs to move towards a service-oriented and component based solution allowing for re-use and a lowered integration tax. However many of the published methods assume a green field situation and a single technology base.

For established operators, and even new operators, integrating multiple Commercial off the Shelf packages using existing methods are not easily realizable.

The TMF has developed a technology neutral architecture NGOSS™ (Next Generation Operations Systems and Services) that is distributed, service-oriented and supports component based implementations. This architecture can be specialized to use a variety of base technologies (e.g., Java, XML, CORBA). Much of the published material to date has focused on defining what NGOSS is.

The NGOSS Lifecycle and Methodology project was established to provide the industry with a common framework on ‘How to use and deploy NGOSS within an organization’. It covers the identifying and describing a business problem and expressing the specification that will be used to direct the development and deployment of practical solutions that:

· Conform to the NGOSS style of problem solving;

· Make use of NGOSS elements contributed from NGOSS projects;

· Use the eTOM, the SID, and the NGOSS technology-neutral architecture.

This document describes the business drivers behind the concept of an NGOSS Lifecycle and Methodology and how they can be realized:

· Incrementally by organizations with high levels of legacy investment;

· To provide underpinnings for those integrating COTS solutions to meet a new business need.

After reading this document you will:

· Know how NGOSS can be applied to solving real world problems

· Know the boundary between what the TMF provides and what must be done by the organisation itself