An ODP enterprise specification of customer service management for connectivity services

Customer service management (CSM) offers a management interface between customers and a service provider, which enables the customers to individually monitor and control their subscribed service. Introducing CSM in the service provider's environment includes communicating and interacting with its service management. Considering the complexity of service management, the goal of this paper is to logically separate CSM and service management, from an enterprise point of view, by identifying specific CSM roles which describe the functions of service management that are relevant for CSM. By using the concepts of roles and associations, we abstract from the details of the underlying service management and identify the requirements that have to be met by the service management. The specific CSM roles and associations are formalized using the terms and concepts of the ODP (open distributed processing) enterprise viewpoint specification in order to ensure that the resulting specification can be applied to a wide range of scenarios. The instantiation of the proposed approach within a real-life scenario shows the applicability and the benefits of our approach.