E-Business covers a broad spectrum of businesses based on the Internet, including e-commerce, e-healthcare, e-government and e tailing. While substantial attention is being given to the planning and development of e-business applications, the efficiency and effectiveness of e-business systems will largely depend on management solutions. These management solutions demand a good grasp of both the technical and business perspectives of an e-business service. There have been many books on the Internet based on e-commerce, Internet protocols, distributed components etc. However, none of these books address the problem of managing e business as a set of networked services. They do not link enterprise management with network and systems management. This book provides an overview of the emerging techniques for IT service management from a business perspective with case studies from telecommunication and healthcare sectors. It integrates the business perspective with relevant technical standards, such as SNMP, WBEM and DMI. This book presents some concepts and methodologies that enable the development of effective and efficient management systems for networked services. The book is intended to familiarize practicing managers, engineers, and graduate level students with networked service management concepts, architectures and methodologies with reference to evolving standards. It should be useful in a number of disciplines, such as business management, information systems, computers and networking, and telecommunications.
Appendix 2 is based on TeleManagement (TM) Forum's documents on TOM (GB921,GB910 and GB908). While this appendix has explained the basic management concept of an e-telco, TMForum now recommends the use of eTOM as explained in www.tmforum.com. An overview of eTOM is available in the report The TeleManagement Forum's enhanced Telecom Operations Map (eTOM) by Michael Kelly appearing in the Journal of Network and Systems Management in March 2003.