User-Driven Service Lifecycle Management - Adopting Internet Paradigms in Telecom Services

The user-centric service creation paradigm set out in Web 2.0 technologies on the Internet allows users to define and share their new content and applications. Open services and interfaces provided by Google et al can be used to build easily, and quickly deploy exciting applications. User-centric service creation provides a cheap solution in contrast with the huge engineering effort that has to be spent both on development and marketing in order to get a new telecom service running and deployed in the market. Adopting Internet paradigms in telecom services requires major flexibility and dynamicity in managing service lifecycle compared to current service management systems. This paper proposes an approach to user-centric service lifecycle management in telecom-oriented platforms. It allows users to drive their services' lifecycle, e.g. when and for how long they must be available, as well as automating the process between the creation and the execution of the services.