Strategic planning – wild cards

A synonym for ‘wild cards’ in many ways is the Black Swan. We’re talking about unexpected, high impact things. We have to recognize that no matter how much data we have about trends and predictions of what’s going to happen in the future there will still be wild cards.
Alan Iny
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OSS are responsible for network monitoring and fault management; with most (but not all) relying on anomaly detection, event correlation and pattern detection based on historical events.

By nature, black swan events have no precedent on which to apply future models. In today’s blog we’ll pick three classes of black swan events to let you ponder the risk/impact they might have on your OSS (either as vendor or operator):

  1. OSS become superseded:
    1. Network virtualisation research spawns a new algorithm that automates everything from the time of a service is invoked
    2. Technological singularity is reached far earlier than expected and networks are able to self-heal, coping with any network failure scenario
    3. Predictive analysis becomes so advanced that all issues are resolved before occurring, Minority Report style
    4. Global economic collapse means the costs of implementing and maintaining OSS outweigh benefits. A globalised labour force brings manual processing costs and risks down below digital processing costs
    5. The touchpoint explosion reaches such a scale that it is no longer viable to monitor and manage any devices on the network. Virtual resources are failing and being killed faster than they can be phoenixed or upscaled by central processing
    6. Amazon rolls out a free global network that soon carries 99% of the world’s traffic and they build in-house OSS tools, thus culling the customer base for OSS
    7. The world’s services “go crypto-cloud” due to central intelligence “lawful intercept” activities on carrier links. Data centres and network aggregation links interconnect all services, so OSS become irrelevant being replaced by encrypted-DCIM-oriented tool-sets
  2. The networks / services that OSS monitor and manage become redundant or inoperable:
    1. An electro-magnetic pulse disables global networks and wipes all digital storage, forcing operators to re-build and revert to historical information stored on paper
    2. A new technology allows any user device to communicate with any other user device globally without needing an intermediate network
    3. Network security breaches by one major player controls every global e-business and places a 50% revenue tax on every company making it no longer commercially viable to run electronic businesses
    4. A biomedical breakthrough means our bodies and embedded peripherals become our network devices that generate information so confidential that OSS are not allowed to process data streams for privacy reasons
    5. Global Telco deregulation means that network services become so commoditised in price that operators can no longer build the networks to support an insatiable global bandwidth demand. Community mesh networks prevail that don’t have a single owning authority. Each community member has their own device to manage with negligible need for network monitoring and management beyond their local domain
    6. Global carriers take heed of ruthless simplification messages on PAOSS. Customer orders for communications services becoming building-block catalog items, turning OSS into glorified service catalogs
  3. The technologies that underpin OSS lose their relevance:
    1. Databases, which all OSS are currently built upon, are superseded by quantum storage, which require a whole new way of storing and surfacing information
    2. HyperBrain network technology is based on principles far removed from current networks and doesn’t use FCAPS (faults, configuration items, performance counters, etc)
    3. Moore’s Law doubles in effect and every device down to the smallest sensor, will be so powerful that network intelligence can be more broadly distributed and there is no need for over-arching OSS

I’d love to post-edit your ideas into this, so please drop me a note with your most outlandish black swans 🙂

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