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Hierarchy Example

There are two types of hierarchies:

• Billing system hierarchies
• Organizational structure hierarchies

Most billing systems cannot accurately model the business structure of an organization, because the two hierarchy structures are usually very different. The following diagram shows how a telecommunication company could model one of their customers in their billing system. In the example, there are two accounts, and each account has several mobile phones. Each account number has an invoice produced for it, and the accounts can be on different billing cycles. In the example shown in Figure 7, account number 1234 is billed on the first of each month, and account number 2345 is billed on the 15th of each month. The billing system might not know that these two accounts belong to the same company.

Figure 7. Billing Hierarchy Example

Most companies have more complex business structures than the preceding example, which they would like to map to the contracts they have with the Service Provider. The example in Figure 8 shows how the two accounts can be modeled from a business structure point of view.

Figure 8. Business Hierarchy Example

The business structure in this example provides much better interaction between the service provider and customer in an online customer self service offering. In this example, both contracts and users are assigned to a business structure. However, in many organizations, one business structure is not sufficient. Month to month, organizations can require a project structure that is very different from the original business structure. Figure 9 illustrates how the same billing hierarchy used in the first business structure can be arranged into a completely different business structure.

Figure 9. Rearranged Business Structure Example

Each of these example of business structures models how a customer could design a hierarchy to support the functions provided in the Self-Service application. Payment, electronic bill viewing, order management, service management, and reporting all use the business structures. Business structures provide the scope for the other components to act on. User and business objects can be assigned to each of the business structures. Hierarchy Manager provides only the business structures and captures user access control. The ability to use this structure to perform analytics, make payments, or other features are the responsibility of the other modules.

Additionally, the user management and role-based access control features are components separate from Hierarchy Manager. The assignment and role of a user at a level of hierarchy is performed using Hierarchy Manager, but management of the user and access control is separate.