to the impacted customers' bills because the network fault caused service level agreement (SLA) violations. In the second scenario, a customer initiates the trouble ticket either via the call center or via a self-care Web portal. The ticket is then "flowed" to the appropriate applications for resolution. Again SLA credits may have to be calculated and applied to the bill. Chapter 6 - Integrating the OSS Platform 1.3 Integrated Customer View Achieving an integrated customer view is different from the previous two examples because it requires a "real time" flow. In the first two scenarios, the order or trouble ticket flows asynchronously from one application to the next. Deriving an integrated customer view, however, requires immediate access to customer data that may reside, i.e. be mastered in, in several systems. Typical examples of the integrated customers view in action include customers accessing a Web portal and being presented with a composite view of their account status, recent billing activity, outstanding trouble tickets and order status information. The same information can also be presented to a customer care representative in a call center. In this scenario, data is "requested" and synthesized from multiple systems such as OE/OM, billing and trouble management applications. Later, we will examine several technical alternatives to providing this integration. 1.4 Data Synchronization Data synchronization represents a more general category of integration requirements. In an ideal situation, the set of selected OSS applications would share a common database, thus obviating the need to maintain redundant data. However, this is not today's OSS reality. Each OSS application today typically has its own proprietary data model and data store, and that information is distributed and stored redundantly across many applications. Customer information provides the classic example, because to some degree, it is maintained in almost every OSS application. This fact makes the ability to capture business events in one 