ing bodies are coming up with joint standards like the CIM/SID Suite, which is a joint venture of the Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF) and the TeleManagement Forum (TMF). This chapter gives an overview on the works of various standardizing bodies in management domain. 7.2 ITU (International Telecommunication Union) The ITU is an international standards organization working in telecom domain. It started as International Telegraph Union in 1865. ITU-T is the standardization Fundamentals of EMS, NMS and OSS/BSS sector of ITU, which is a specialized agency of the United Nations (UN). The stan- dards of ITU-T carry more significance in the international market compared to other standardizing bodies due to the link with the UN. Due to this reason well- accepted standards from other standardizing bodies are usually send to ITU-T to get their acceptance. An example of this is the e-TOM model of TMF that was adopted by a majority of service providers and later was accepted by ITU-T. It is based in Geneva, Switzerland and has members from both public and private sectors. Standards from ITU-T are referred to as "Recommendations," the development of which is managed by study groups (SG) and focus groups (FG). While a study group is more organized with regular face-to-face meetings and adherence to strict guidelines and rules of ITU-T, the focus group is more flexible in organization and financing. To be more precise, a focus group can be created quickly to work on a particular area in developing standards, deliverables are determined by the group unlike guidelines from ITU-T and they are usually dissolved once the standard is released. There is a separate group called telecommunication standardization advi- sory group (TSAG) for reviewing priorities, programs, operations, financial mat- ters, and strategies for the sector. The TSAG also establishes and provides guidelines to the study groups. The recommendations of ITU-T have names like Y.2111, where "Y" corresponds to the series and "2111" is an identifying number f