their time. As Tony Kalcina, CEO of the OSS ven- dor Clarity International, said to a senior member of Xacct in late 2000, "If the backend connectivity were in place, you might have stumbled upon the holy grail of OSS there." Back then, only a few service providers had begun to put in place a unified system with management control across all network elements. Consciousness of the desirability and eventual need for one-touch service provisioning was nowhere near as widespread amongst telecom carriers as it is today. 13 By the time this book is published, several service providers may already have this capability. 14 Also see Chapter 7. OSS for Telecom Networks equipment is intelligent, with the intelligence residing in the instructions whose detailed content is based on data. The control programs in the switches provide basic services such as connectivity of network bearers. 15 In an "unintelligent" network, services such as 1800 and call forwarding can be implemented by adding service logic and data to the program installed in each switch. However, the switch-based approach is prohibitive in development time, cost and management effort. These are all reduced by an IN architecture. Further, the range of services that can be implemented is much larger owing to the greater flexibility of a computing device. The idea of the intelligent network is that the infrastructure is not constrained providing just one type of service. Thus, a service management system that takes advantage of the intelligent network should be able to change its configuration dyna- mically so that it may support many services with little redevelopment. It should be flexible enough to be able to manage unpredictable network growth, and it should be able to manage network elements and application servers. The intelligent network comprises service control points (SCPs), service nodes (SNs), compact service nodes (CSNs), a service creation environment (SCE) and a service management system. Intelligence becomes more distributed when multiple SCPs and 