severely inhibit the TTM goals. Often customer care systems are the last to be developed or upgraded to cater for new products and services. The infrastructure and software for the new services are frequently available long before the customer care systems and procedures can be updated to handle them. This causes delays in launching the new services in the marketplace. Telecom Management - Operations Billing is a vital area for operator business, since collection of billing revenues and customer billing satisfaction can build up competitive advantages. The position of billing at the end of the process chain is shown in Figure 16.20. The IT development costs for a rapidly evolving operator is a dominant expenditure. It can even be greater than expenditures on the network infrastructure. Huge costs are frequently involved in adapting billing systems to new technologies and services. Fur- thermore, the billing adaptation can lead to fatal errors resulting in end-user annoyance. Therefore it is usual that most operators shudder when there is even a hint of a change on billing systems. Network evolution process must consider this, creating an environ- ment as simple as possible, and preventing adaptations and redevelopment as far as possible. Telecom management systems are the main input for billing and customer care, as they concentrate all the information available regarding status and events on network elements and call control servers. This theoretically opens the possibility to use any type of charging method or philosophy that might be imagined. Even if often limited in reality, there is a high degree of flexibility in defining the ways of charging that may be found suitable for customer billing satisfaction and business profitability. Billing/accounting is based on event collection. All the events in the network, either call control or network element information, associated with billing are defined and informed via the telecom management system and sent to the billing mediation platform and to data warehousing