GOSS principles. Wide spread adoption of NGOSS has led to significant reduction in operation expenditure and reduced integration cost. NGOSS offers an integrated framework that looks into capturing needs, designing, implementing and deploying operational and business support systems. 21.2 NGOSS Overview The service providers following legacy OSS process and solutions are having considerably high operational costs. The lack of automated flow-through process has resulted in higher manpower costs. Time to market is significantly high in these industries due to rigid and inflexible business processes. Legacy systems do not scale with change in requirements leading to higher costs for enhancements and integration to support changes in technology. The impact of having legacy process and rigid systems becomes evident in a multiservice, multitechnology, and multi- vendor environment where adaptability and interoperability are key concerns, and mergers and acquisitions are quite common. These can also result in poor customer service because of poorly integrated systems with inconsistent data. The NGOSS approach to this problem is to adopt the lean operator model in telecom industry, which has already proved its effectiveness in automobile, banking, and retail industries. The main attributes of a lean operator are reduced operational costs and a flexible infrastructure. The reduced cost of operations in a lean operator model is achieved with high levels of automation. Seamless flow of information across modules is a major requirement of the lean model, which can be achieved with standard information model and well-defined interfaces for NGOSS Enterprise application integration Legacy Loosely coupled Distributed Figure 21.1 Changes in architecture. interaction. The seamless flow of data also ensures that data is consistent leading to better customer service. Customer self-care is also suggested to bring down opera- tional costs, reducing the need for more customer desk executives. Commercial off the shelf products that has 