e Publishers, 2000. 7. Christos Voudouris, Gilbert Owusu, Raphael Dorne, and David Lesaint. Service Chain Management: Technology Innovation for the Service Business. New York: Springer, 2008. Chapter 24 Information Models This chapter is about information models. Two of the most popular information models in telecom domain, the Common Information Model (CIM) and Shared Information/Data Model are discussed in this chapter. TeleManagement Forum (TMF) and Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF) have developed a map- ping between these two information models. 24.1 Introduction Information models are important for application scalability. For example, consider a simple order management solution that uses two fields, first name and last name to represent the name of a customer. Another application for customer support uses three fields, first name, middle name, and last name to represent the name of a customer that contacts the support desk for assistance. The data collected and used by one of these applications cannot be used directly by the other application due to discrepancy in the number of fields used to collect the customer name. If the customer support application wants to check the order details of the customer by interacting with the order management module, then the customer name sent by the customer support application will not match the name used by the order management module. So standardization of information is required to ensure that an application and the information base are more scalable. For the above example, the standardization of information is achieved by defin- ing the number of fields to be used in defining a customer name. For a customer entity, there will be multiple attributes that can be used to define the entity. The number of fields to be used for each of these attributes, if defined, will improve Fundamentals of EMS, NMS and OSS/BSS interoperability between modules that work on the customer entity. So if a cus- tomer name is defined to have first name, middle name, and last name in al