OSS – like a duck on a pond

Let’s start with a basic question. “What does an OSS need to do?”

The basic answer is, “make operations easier.”

The real answer(s) is so much more nuanced than that of course. The term easier can also encapsulate other words such as faster, more accurate, more repeatable, cheaper, etc.

Designing, building, operating and maintaining a sizable network is extremely challenging, despite network operators around the world, and the vendors that supply to them, employing some of the best and brightest. So we design OSS and related tools / processes to make operations easier.

Yet I sometimes wonder whether we achieve that aim – to make operations easier. Seems to me that we tend to focus more on just replicating functions at a higher layer in the management stack. That is, moving the function to the OSS rather than EMS/NMS, without really making it much easier operationally.

Let’s start at the user interface (UI). How often are they intuitive enough for an experienced network operator to start doing tasks with negligible OSS expert guidance?
Let’s look at deployments. How often are the projects low on effort, risk, cost and complexity?
Let’s look at flexibility (ie in-flight modifications or transformations). How often do we actually deliver flexibility to our customers through our OSS. To ask the same as above, how often are our changes low on effort, risk, cost and complexity?

As a small step towards providing an answer, I wonder whether it’s a case of making the hard things look easy and the easy things look hard.

We want to make the really hard operational things much easier to do within an OSS because that’s the primary purpose of an OSS. That’s the example of a duck on a pond. The OSS is gliding along effortlessly across the top of the water, but under the water it is paddling furiously.

Conversely, we want to make the really easy* operational things look hard to do within an OSS so that we’re not constantly being asked to build functionality / complexity into our OSS that doesn’t warrant being there. It diffuses the intent of the OSS. Just because we can, doesn’t mean we should.

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