The Management Support Organization Noc Noc Whos There
The ingredients that we have introduced so far—network elements and management agents, management systems, and management network—are all that is required to make network management work from a technical perspective. However, if we really want to successfully run a network, we are not quite finished. Missing is the organization that will be responsible for running the network—ultimately, the people who use all that management technology. Unless you are a small business that has few devices that can all be managed by a jack-of-all-trades system administrator and that buys everything else that is needed from an outside service provider, chances are good that some consideration will have to be given this aspect as well.
In this section, we briefly discuss some of these nontechnical aspects. You can think of the organizational aspects as a separate problem dimension in network management. This dimension exists in parallel and in addition to the technical dimension. Of course, there is a mutual dependency between the two—at the end of the day, the sole purpose of all the technical management infrastructure that is put in place is to support the organization that is running the network in the best possible manner. For this reason, telecommunications service providers quite fittingly refer to management systems often as operational support systems (OSS). By this, they mean that systems must blend in with their operational support environment and be used to provide operational support functions.
At the same time, the organization must account for and accommodate certain technical realities that come with the nature of running a communications network. In some cases, the organization must adapt to what is technically possible as well. How to best organize the management organization is a significant topic in itself, and we can only touch the tip of the iceberg in this chapter.
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