rics and direct, end-process quality measures with any degree of credibility or reliability. Systems or application implementations tend to be "silo" focused, that is, implemented without a concept of process flow from system to system. Business processes break down these silos by focusing on the goal instead of the task. In other words, business processes force applications to think in terms of the customer, not systems. With effective business processes in place, the application or system becomes the "tool" to accomplish an activity or task, not the task itself. In an effort to sell, many OSS vendors claim that they provide business processes and industry best practices embedded in their packages. While this is partly true, all successful IICs have to enhance, extend, or even redesign the vendor-supplied processes. Most OSS vendors are rooted in software or Chapter 4 - Developing an OSS Strategy hardware technologies, and often lack thought leadership when it comes to business processes. The processes application vendors supply tend to be limited in terms of products, equipment, customer segment and sales channels. These processes are also limited to specific areas of OSS functionality, such as billing, provisioning, activation, and sales rather than addressing the entire end-to-end enterprise. The IIC is better served by having an internal team or systems integrator focus on developing the operational business processes, rather than the vendors. ENABLING COMPETITIVE DIFFERENTIATION There are many types of competitive differentiation that an IIC may chose as part of its overall strategy, including being a low cost provider, providing high-end customer service, enabling a Web-centric approach for all customer touch points, and having the industry's fastest provisioning time. Regardless of competitive strategy, it is achieved through OSS. Some examples of competitive differentiation and the underlying OSS implications are provided below, and will be expanded upon in Chapter 6 when we discuss OSS integration. Busi