hip management. It not only covers network management, but also enlarges its scope to application and computing management and management integration while defining the relationships between these areas and network management. It decouples lifecycle management, including development processes, from oper- ations and day-to-day processes. It can represent both the framework, static, and the process flow, dynamic, views of processes, including high-level information requirements and business rules for strong linkage to automation solutions. It provides a process framework that reflects the most current thinking in design- - ing and documenting processes. It is clear that the eTOM is of immediate benefit in the billing and customer care side of telecom operations, because clear value is derived from linking those areas to the marketing, sales and financial control systems of the wider organisation. At the lower, network management level, bandwidth swapping makes the connections with suppliers and partners very valuable by smoothing capacity utilization. The eTOM formalises this. The eTOM has only begun to seep into the thinking of net- work management OSS vendors, but it will inevitably grow in importance with automated interlinking of telecom carriers. Network Inventory Management 10.1 Introduction Telecom network inventory is slightly different from inventory in the "bricks-and- mortar" world. When one thinks about physical inventory, one generally considers that the inventory itself has intrinsic value that can be realised by its sale. For exam- ple, if a Parisian patisserie has 1000 croissants in inventory, then by selling those croissants their value is realised. A service provider does not realise the value in their network by selling the network itself. Rather, the service provider sells capac- ity in the network's traffic-carrying capability. Thus, physical network inventory needs to be managed primarily for maintenance and for usage accounting pur- poses. Usage accounting is necessary for billing. On the oth