“End to end” thinking is a mantra in our industry. We have always felt need to understand the entire experience delivered by service, ideally as a customer sees it. This much is true. Too often however, and driven by (many) decades-old technology and practices, we mistakenly believe this means building monolithic network/service models, fulfillment processes, and assurance processes. This practice must end if we want true agility. Rather, it is imperative that we move to a very different conceptual model – one of loosely coupled, autonomous (and likely autonomic) domains. Why? Consider three scenarios: Scenario #1: An SP is involved in a digital collaboration with a network of health providers, medical devices (“things”), and a medical technology company operating cloud based services. Each of these firms will manage it’s own “domain” and therefore they must be loosely coupled. In fact, service provider engineers may have little knowledge that they even exist. Scenario #2: Virtual technologies such as NFV, SDN and modern RANs must be self-managing (autonomic). Therefore, they too must be loosely coupled to any telco-wide E2E view and service model. Within each domain NFVs may be moving and scaling, SDN flows re-arranged, and RAN parameters dynamically optimized by SON. […]