important to see how it evolved. Remember that OSSs began as machines to help people perform standard, telephone company operations jobs. They were stand-alone platforms that handled billing, orders, network inventory and workforce management. Early network management and activation systems were generally equipment- and vendor-specific. S. Jain et al., Broadband Infrastructure BusinessEdge Solutions Inc. 2003 The Ultimate Guide to Building and Delivering OSS/BSS As competition increased and network technologies changed, especially in the mid-1990s, providers needed more customer care and customer relationship management (CRM) applications. They also had to manage a more diverse set of network equipment, which created a demand for multi- vendor network activation and management software that the equipment vendors didn't provide. With deregulation in 1996 came increased talk of convergent service offerings, driving billing vendors to develop billing systems capable of supporting any service offering. Further, deregulation created a need for interconnect gateway software and interfaces that would allow IICs to order network services from each other. More interconnections among IICs have brought more pressure for IIC-to-IIC billing applications similar to traditional carrier access billing systems (CABS). A more recent critical development has been a shift to making OSS applications Internet and eBusiness-capable. Most OSS applications are now developed with Web-based interfaces, hooks and APIs to Web applications and the Internet. It's important to understand both how an OSS function originated and its place in an integrated, eBusiness environment in order to understand that function's role in the overall OSS process. Order Entry The order entry process is relatively straightforward, though it has become more complicated in step with increasing service complexity and an increased focus on customer self-help. The steps in the order entry process include capturing and validating the order and related customer informat