move it and reconnect it. Without integration among workforce systems and processes to enforce collaboration among partners or competitors, simply trying to schedule this kind of rendezvous can cause serious delays in service delivery. Whether both technicians manage to show up at the same time is another story. Flow-through provisioning, as rare as it is in IIC back offices, is even more rare when provisioning across trading partner boundaries. In some cases, simple loop orders can flow-through, but anything more complex can require hours of phone calls and manual processes. When mistakes happen in configuring a service - and they can happen often - rescheduling technicians to troubleshoot and fix the can problem cause even more delays. When every day an ordered service isn't active is a potential day's worth of billing lost, finding a way to smooth out these inter-IIC processes by building automation wherever possible is one of the next critical steps for establishing eBusiness among IICs. BILLING AND MEDIATION Billing systems, true to their name, are responsible for billing customers for IIC services. They can also be the master source of customer and product catalog data for the rest of an OSS platform. Originally, billing systems did little more than calculate bills. Now they are generally integrated with more sophisticated customer care, product creation and account management features. Basic billing models traditionally price services based on per second, minute or hour usage, flat monthly fees and non-recurring charges (NRCs) such as those for installation or maintenance. Billing itself has become far more complex in recent years. As IICs have begun to expand their offerings The Ultimate Guide to Building and Delivering OSS/BSS far beyond basic voice services, they have had to develop new billing models and technologies. Complex rating engines have emerged to manage everything from cross-product discounts to billing for IP services based on total bandwidth used and guaranteed quality of service (QoS). Old