The OSS farm equipment analogy

OSS End of Financial Year
It’s an interesting season as we come up to the EOFY (end of financial year – on 30 June). Budget cycles are coming to an end. At organisations that don’t carry un-spent budgets into the next financial year, the looming EOFY triggers a use-it-or-lose-it mindset.

In some cases, organisations are almost forced to allocate funds on OSS investments even if they haven’t always had the time to identify requirements and / or model detailed return projections. That’s normally anathema to me because an OSS’ reputation is determined by the demonstrable value it creates for years to come. However, I can completely understand a client’s short-term objectives. The challenge we face is to minimise any risk of short-term spend conflicting with long-term objectives.

I take the perspective of allocating funds to build the most generally useful asset (BTW, I like Robert Kiyosaki’s simple definition of an asset as, “in reality, an asset is only something that puts money in your pocket,”) In the case of OSS, putting money in one’s pocket needs to consider earnings [or cost reductions] that exceed outgoings such as maintenance, licensing, operations, etc as well as cost of capital. Not a trivial task!

So this is where the farm equipment analogy comes in.

If we haven’t had the chance to conduct demand estimation (eg does the telco’s market want the equivalent of wheat, rice, stone fruit, etc) or product mix modelling (ie which mix of those products will bear optimal returns) then it becomes hard to predict what type of machinery is best fit for our future crops. If we haven’t confirmed that we’ll focus efforts on wheat, then it could be a gamble to invest big in a combine harvester (yet). We probably also don’t want to invest capital and ongoing maintenance on a fruit tree shaker if our trees won’t begin bearing fruit for another few years.

Therefore, a safer investment recommendation would be on a general-purpose machine that is most likely to be useful for any type of crop (eg a tractor).

In OSS terminology, if you’re not sure if your product mix will provision 100 customers a day or 100,000 then it could be a little risky to invest in an off-the-shelf orchestration / provisioning engine. Still potentially risky, but less so, would be to invest in a resource and service inventory solution (if you have a lot of network assets), alarm management tools (if you process a lot of alarms), service order entry, workforce management, etc.

Having said that, a lot of operators already have a strong gut-feel for where they intend to get returns on their investment. They may not have done the numbers extensively, but they know their market roadmap. If wheat is your specialty, go ahead and get the combine harvester.

I’d love to get your take on this analogy. How do you invest capital in your OSS without being sure of the projections (given that we’re never sure on projections becoming reality)?

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