rd mechanism." There was no true connector available between the network management system and the EAI bus. The The Ultimate Guide to Building and Delivering OSS/BSS client chose to have the integrator build a custom connector using the EAI vendor's connector solution development kit (SDK). Once again, this was a custom development project, but made easier by the availability of strong development tools from the EAI vendor. The trade off for the MSP was undertaking development and maintenance of the customer connector in order to deliver some business value with these proactive trouble management processes. In this case, the value of the capabilities far outweighed the expense and responsibility associated with the connector. 18.5 Web Portal Company: Data and voice service provider to small and medium businesses utilizing CLEC strategy in tier-two cities. Goal: Provide for customer self-ordering and provisioning via a Web portal integrated to underlying order management and provisioning system. Technology: Web portal built with commercial development environment, leading EAI package, and leading OM and provisioning application. Challenges: To understand custom data model and map elements of it to the OM/provisioning application's APIs. Also, to upgrade the IICs business processes and underlying systems to support self-ordering and provisioning in conjunction with integration. Scenario: The IIC's priority was to Web-enable as much customer self-serve functionality as possible. Rather than buy a commercial Web self-care application, it decided to build its own using Web development tools. The IIC then brought in an integrator to tie the new Web portal to the order management and provisioning application. The integrator thus ran into a problem common to customer development, namely, who understands the custom system? In many cases, the developers have moved on, or pieces of the application may have been outsourced to a development shop. In any case, there really is no one experienced with the internals of system. In