es, who handle a wide range of customer issues for a small number of customers with whom they have "personal" relationships. In other business models, there may be large, centralized call centers to field customer inquiries. This provides a higher likelihood that calls can be escalated to more qualified and skilled employees to resolve problems. Conversely, in a decentralized environment there may be relatively unskilled customer care representatives with no inherent knowledge of the customer who require more automation, scripting and prompting to lead the customer to a conclusion. Each model has different needs for automation, organizational and business process impacts and training requirements. 1.4 Budget and Investment Strategy IICs often paint themselves into a corner by underestimating the overall cost, in terms of time and money, associated with OSS implementations. In their defense, there has been little in the way of benchmarks or budgeting models to guide them. Because there is no historical precedence for emerging companies building OSSs nor established budget benchmarks for it, few guidelines exist to aid in the budgeting process. Benchmarks the ILECs have The Ultimate Guide to Building and Delivering OSS/BSS used in years past are now irrelevant, outdated by several factors, such as advances in technology, a wider variety of business models and marketing strategies, new products and services, a greater availability of OSS capabilities, as well as more package solution options. With no clear guide, IICs have been forced to break new ground and "wing it." As such, IICs sometimes make the mistake of approaching an OSS project like building a network, figuring that the majority of the costs come up front, but decline significantly once the infrastructure is in place. With OSS, this is never the case. In fact, it is generally the opposite because the IIC's business and networks are constantly changing. Although the type of cost - development or maintenance - will vary, the level of spending on OSS will re