ications industry organisation which works to develop OSS standards and to catalyse development of OSS technolo- gies for the telecom industry. Members of the TMF include telecommunications serv- ice providers, infrastructure owners and managers, network equipment vendors, systems integrators and network management OSS vendors. The TMF has developed the Telecom Operations Map (TOM) to act as a guideline for processes in the management of telecommunications network infrastructures, services and other aspects of the business of telecommunications. More recently, the TMF developed the Extended Telecom Operations MapTM TM (eTOM), which seeks to define processes across the entire telecom service provider business, and includes extensions that are necessary for a telecom service provider to function as an e-business. Amongst other things, eTOM encompasses human resources management, financial management, marketing and links between telecom service providers and other stakeholders such as suppliers and customers. TMF has issued documents on TOM, eTOM and the applications of both. Information on these documents can be found at www.tmforum.org. This chapter introduces the TOM. The aim of the TMF in developing the TOM is to describe a high-level identifica- tion of the primary end-to-end processes of fulfillment, assurance and billing and their sub-processes. TMF's development of the TOM has proved useful for the industry because it: uses a high-level and generic approach which can be applied to almost any par- ticular setting has been developed in consultation with the industry and embodies a wide range of views on network operations is based on real network architectures is based on how service providers actually manage their network operations. 8.2 What is the Telecom Operations Map? The TOM uses the layers of the Telecommunication Management Network (TMN) model of the International Telecommunications Union (ITU-T) to organise core K. Misra et al. (eds.), OSS for Telecom Networks © Springer-Verlag London Limited 2004 OS