Sutton’s Law of OSS

Willie Sutton was an accomplished bank robber, particularly during the 1920s and 1930. Named after Willie, Sutton’s Law effectively states, “I go to where the money is,” which was supposedly Sutton’s response to a reporter’s question asking why he robbed banks instead of easier targets.

Interestingly for the OSS industry, we seem to follow the inverse of Sutton’s Law. We go to where the money isn’t. In other words, we mostly attempt to build business cases around the “cost-out” model, helping our customers achieve cost savings. These savings are in the form of automations that lead to reductions in head-count, cost of doing business, etc. Think about the common buzz-words – AI, machine learning, virtualisation, etc. Are they Sutton, or inverse-Sutton?

Truth be told, we do still go to where the money is because our customers (the network operators) are willing to spend money to save even more money. But you can see where I’m coming from can’t you?

Let me pose a question for you? Who is more likely to be comfortable spending money, someone who is confident in making money from the investment or someone who is going to save money from an investment?

I’d back Sutton’s Law and respond with the former. But we don’t tend to follow Sutton’s Law very often. It can often be challenging because so many of the benefits of our OSS and BSS are intangible. We’re seen as cost centres because we don’t do a good enough job of showing how important we are at operationalising everything that happens in a service provider’s network (and business).

At TM Forum’s DTA event a couple of weeks ago, I was pleased to see that some of the big telco API initiatives (eg Telkomsel, Telstra’s Network as a Service [NaaS] and China Mobile’s Data Security and Privacy Management Framework) are starting to make a real impact. The API model represents our strongest industry-wide push towards revenue-based business cases in years (that I can remember anyway).

Monty Hong of Telkomsel (Indonesia) made a presentation that provides a useful guide for future telco value-stream / revenue-models, effectively showing Sutton’s Law at play:
https://passionateaboutoss.com/how-oss-bss-facilitated-telkomsels-structural-revenue-changes.

The API model is an interesting one though. As well as revenue-in, it also potentially represents a cost out model (ie reduced cost of sales), a platform play (ie leveraging the network effect by allowing partners to build their own revenues on top), but on the downside also potentially triggers revenue cannibalisation.

Personally, I’m considering Sutton’s Law more in terms of our customers’ customers (ie end users of communication services, like the gamers in the Monty Hong link) rather than customers (ie the comms service providers that want to reduce costs).

I’d love to hear about your perception of Sutton’s Law in OSS. Where do you think the money is?

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