5G-VINNI is trying to set a pathway for OSS and BSS evolution to support this and has identified a number of ‘maturity levels’ that are required to get there. It’s a sort of pathway, with clearly defined steps. If we explore the ultimate realization of this – Maturity Level 4 (ML4) – we can see the vision in full:

From this, we can see that there are three new requirements for the telecoms service inventory management solution. These are:

• Homogenous service E2E – concerned with service consistency for vertical players and the attributes (and hence resources) required to deliver this
• Slice control – the coordination and orchestration of dedicated network slices for the vertical customer, which demands understanding the location of resources whose capabilities need to be configured and controlled
• Assisted customer access – informing customers of event changes and allowing them to monitor service and faults

Of course, there are many similarly complex requirements for other components of these evolved OSS and BSS layers, but it’s clear that it builds on established principles while demanding evolution to embrace new features.