OSS BSS : Introduction

Operational Support Systems (OSS) and Business support systems (BSS) are sofware applications along with necessary hardware used by telecom service provider to run its network and business. Typical types of activities that count as part of OSS BSS are taking a customer' s order, configuring network components, creating a bill and managing faults, revenue assurance, fraud management, mediation, provisioning, inventory management, decision support system.
Evolution of OSS and BSS systems:
OSS activities were previously done manually, by passing paper around. Being person dependent activity, it was prone to inefficiency and delays. Indian telecom consumers (called subscribers in years gone by) would recollect long wait to hear dial done in their instrument even after equally long wait to get the instrument issued and installed. ) This delay was because OSS that were manual and person dependent. There was worldwide move towards system dependent operations support system, by leveraging computers. With growth of IT , the telephone companies created a number of computing systems (or software applications) which automated this activity to limited extent. Gap was that these applications were not linked to each other and therefore often required manual intervention. For example, consider the case where a customer wants to order a new telephone service. The ordering system would take the customer’s details and order parameters (type of service/plan/pre-paid/postpaid/cotact details etc), but would not be able to configure the telephone exchange directly - this would be done by a switch management system. So the details of the new service would need to be transferred from the order handling system to the switch management system - and this would normally be done by a technician rekeying the details from one screen into another - a process often referred to as “swivel chair integration”. This was clearly another source of inefficiency, so the focus on the next few years was on creating automated interfaces between the OSS applications - OSS integration. To a large extent, cheap and simple OSS integration remains the goal of Telco’s IT departments. Today there is talk of service oriented architecture using standards like BPEL to achieve goal of OSS integration; current generation can devote their carrier to this mission.
Building blocks of OSS:

Four pillers of OSS are processes, data, applications and technology. (pretty much like any IT system) These are defined as below

• Processes- the sequence of events that have to be automated.
• Data- the information that flows in predefined workflow defined in process.
• Applications- the components that implement processes to manage data (huge lines of software code)
• Technology- Software and hardware stack/standards on which applications are developed/implemented.

ITU-T did pioneering work in defining OSS architecture and its pillers (for details please refer to TMN model by ITU -T) They established a 4-layer model of TMN applicable within an OSS :

• Business Management Level(BML)
• Service Management Level(SML)
• Network Management Level(NML)
• Element Management Level(EML)

This was a basis for later work that has currently evolved to NGOSS (next generation operations support system; more on this comes shortly)
Scope of network management is defined using the FCAPS model - Fault, Configuration, Accounting, Performance and Security. FCAPS model is adopted by the ITU-T TMN standards (for details refer TMN standards M.3000 - M.3599 series.)

New Generation operations systems and software. (NGOSS)
TM forum (TMF) is body defining standards for NGOSS .
Focus of NGOSS is to address integration concerns defined above.
TM Forum has established a set of principles that an OSS integration should adopt, and givens set of models to standardised approaches for integration. The models include

• Information model : called the Shared Information/Data model, or SID
• Process model called the enhanced Telecom Operation Map, or eTOM
• Lifecycle model.

The TMF describes NGOSS as a “loosely coupled” , ' distributed' ; ' component based architecture' along with functioning application components upon which a telecom business can run. The components interact through a common information bus . The components can be programmed through the use of a process management tool to control the business processes of the service provider using the functionality provided by the components
Technolgy platform for NGOSS:

The TMF’s work so far has been technology neutral, (therefore implies that there remains considerable work to create a functioning OSS estate from NGOSS principles.) However, there are now a number of standardised technology-specific implementations of NGOSS, of which OSS through Java initiative (OSS/J) is one.