to enter new markets outside their home territory. Shifting these applications from a domestic focus to more open, international approaches will provide the ultimate test of their flexibility and adaptability. IICs looking to expand into international markets will face significant OSS costs, either in shifting current systems and processes to an The Ultimate Guide to Building and Delivering OSS/BSS international business model, or in building new OSS platforms to support new business. The latter essentially means starting the entire OSS selection, implementation and integration process from scratch, where the former would certainly require significant spending for custom development. 7. EXPERTISE Whatever the future holds for eBusiness and OSS, the one certainty is that the people creating and implementing them will require increasingly deeper and broader levels of knowledge and experience. Knowing the specific details of how OSS applications function, how IIC business processes flow, and how eBusiness works is absolutely necessary for success. Generally, IICs do not maintain this kind of depth of expertise in-house, SO they turn to consultants and systems integrators to provide it. The challenge for IICs when dealing with many consultants and integrators in this field is that they often lack industry- specific expertise. These companies often simply "throw bodies" at major OSS projects. Groups of newly trained consultants, often fresh out of school, are assigned to projects on a scale they have never seen before. They could be implementing a general ledger system for a manufacturing company one week, only to work with a provisioning system the next. What often results is another permutation of the 80/20 rule - in this case, 20% of the people on the project have some industry experience, whereas 80% have little or none. OSS and eBusiness are simply too complicated for this kind of practice. As we have discussed, it takes highly skilled and experienced people to select, implement, integrate and configure an OSS pl