ITU-T M.1402 PDF

Service management is the universe of discourse (UoD) of this Recommendation. This UoD comprises products, customers, accounts, contracts, deals, addresses, prices and various segments and relationships between these.

The focus of this Recommendation is on end-user terminology as defined in an external terminology schema and which puts requirements on other schemata and implementations. As such, this Recommendation focuses on the definition of object and reference classes, and provides most identifiers and name bindings (i.e., subordinate object indicated by reversed arrowheads) for these. It also provides some attribute groups and attributes which are essential to define the data structure. Other attributes, e.g., to indicate entity history, are not covered. Also data structures for orders are not covered.

The data definitions are meant to cover the needs for customer inquiries and customer sales about the customer, their services and relations to the operator, but the definitions do not provide background information for sales people and account managers who provide offers and contracts to large customers. These may need processed information about turnover and plans for a customer/cooperation. The data structure may apply for these needs as well, but additional attributes are required. The data structure lacks the means to provide overviews for market analyses. Also, a network view for answering customer inquiries and service delivery is missing.

The data definitions cover product types as they are defined in product catalogues and cover product instances in customer databases. A subset of these product types and product instances may be implemented as telecommunication services, e.g., in a service platform. The broader context of product catalogues and customer databases is essential for definition and harmonization of service types and instances. The object class service is not defined in this Recommendation. However, the data structure defines the scope of service management.

It should be noted that product types within product catalogues are in this Recommendation defined as classes of product instances within contracts. This means that the product types may contain data that are not needed in a pure enterprise product catalogue, but these data are needed for the product catalogue to serve the role of being a schema. One contract instance may have several product catalogue instances as its schemata. One product instance in a contract is, however, only generated from one product type within a product catalogue.