Network inventory with GIS features (Score 1)

The thing you're looking for is a network inventory system. There are many companies offering these products, for example Amdocs (Resource Manager product, old company name Cramer, lacks GIS features but otherwise one of the best products), Smallworld (including top-notch GIS, but less elegant when it comes to logical network), Ericsson (old company name Telcordia, including GIS and better logical network inventory support than Smallworld), and Comptel (a bunch of products). These products are not cheap. See TeleManagement Forum for lots of information on this, http://tmforum.org/ In the long run, you will need all of the stuff, and it's not an easy thing. GIS features only tie your network elements to the geography (the Earth), and then you want to know all the components you have, as objects in a database. Stupid drawings will only get you so far, and you really want everything to be completely automatic, i.e. computer-understandable. If you have to look at "paper drawings" to figure out what's wrong, ... welcome to 1980s telco management, you're about 30 years late. You also want to know all the stuff that's dependent on each component. You must be able to do "impact analysis", i.e. if I now cut this fibre, which services and which customers might be affected. That's "customer impact of resource", but then you also want to know "resource impact of customer", i.e. top-down. As the organization grows and you get more customers and a more heterogeneous network, this problem becomes less and less trivial. There are companies like OSI (Objective Systems Integrators, not the "OSI model" thing) and Ontology Systems who have products for importing stuff about the network and the services (from a big mess of multiple legacy databases) to try and figure out the relationships. Oh, and then you'll want to have a fully automatic order-delivery process. Automatic alert filtering. How do you do trouble-ticketing and resolution tracking? Your products will have to be described as objects in a database, and they'll have to connect to your customer data. And not only the "things", but the "doings" like orders and deliveries, fixing of faults, etc. You'll notice things like... the customer, product, service, resource layers. OSS and BSS. You'll want to use external contractors/suppliers/partners. You'll get data quality issues. You'll have regulatory issues. You want to let external partners access your data in a controlled fashion. You might say, you just want to do something simple at first. Good luck. Eventually, when you've had enough of the real-world stupidity of operating a physical cable network, a bigger telco will buy your assets and (hopefully) try and migrate your mess of documentation into a proper (i.e. very expensive) inventory system with all the other needed systems around it.