Description of Document

The Connection and Service Management Solution Set (TMF807) defines a protocol specific (in CORBA IDL) Interface Information model for protocol neutral model described by TMF 508: Connection and Service Management Information Model (CaSMIM) Business Agreement and TMF 605: Connection and Service Management Information Model (CaSMIM) Information Agreement and so the reader should be already familiar these higher-level protocol neutral documents.

The CORBA IDL Solution Set is to be used primarily for specifying and developing products which use CORBA IDL. For further information on the model, the reader can also consult the above-mentioned associated Business and Information Agreements. 

Applications

It is expected that this document will be used:

· To facilitate requirement agreement between Service Providers and vendors

· As input to a service Provider’s Request for Information / Request for Proposal (RFx)

· To allow operational support managers to compare their requirements with those identified by the project.

· As input for companies developing COTS products

As a source of requirements for other bodies working in this area

Background

The traditional method of implementing service requests does not meet the requirements of the new market environment.  A single service request may require that many connections be established using multiple technologies. Each of these technologies may be implemented with equipment from multiple vendors. Relying on manual processes or the creation of flow through messaging with custom interfaces between each management systems implies a long lead-time for the introduction of new services and a large expenditure in either operations or systems development or both.

The requirement to relate faults to services in a meaningful way adds additional problems when fault management is traditionally focused on equipment and not services; to correlate faults to services, information must be pieced together across all the systems involved in the service and refocused for service management.  Introducing new services can be a nightmare; changes are required in many management systems and delay introduction. It's clear that these methods do not work very well. The Connection and Service Management Suite of documents aims to provide a solution to this problem.