A method and apparatus for deploying EMS provisioning services is provided. A communication to administer a particular service on a network element is transmitted from an EMS client to an EMS server. The communication contains service data that describes a particular service to be administered on the network element. The EMS server constructs an instance of a generic record that stores the service data. The EMS server selects a service module to process the instance based on which service is associated with the service data stored in the instance. The instance is processed to produce result data that describes the result of processing the service data at the network element. The EMS server stores the result data in a persistent store. This generic framework enables communications between EMS clients and the EMS server involving different services to be processed similarly. New services are added without modification to the generic framework.