May I ask you a question? Do the senior executives at your organisation ever USE your OSS/BSS?
I’d love to hear your answer.
My guess is that few, if any, do. Not directly anyway. They may depend on reports whose data comes from our OSS, but is that all?
Execs are ultimately responsible for signing off large budget allocations (in CAPEX and OPEX) for our OSS. But if they don’t see any tangible benefits, do the execs just see OSS as cost centres? And cost centres tend to become targets for cost reduction right?
Building on last week’s OSS Scoreboard Analogy, the senior execs are the head coaches of the team. They don’t need the transactional data our OSS are brilliant at collating (eg every network device’s health metrics). They need insights at a corporate objective level.
How can we increase the executives’s, “what’s in it for me?” ranking of the OSS/BSS we implement? We can start by considering OSS design through the lens of senior executive responsibilities:
- Strategy / objective development
- Strategy execution (planning and ongoing management to targets)
- Clear communication of priorities and goals
- Optimising productivity
- Risk management / mitigation
- Optimising capital allocation
- Team development
And they are busy, so they need concise, actionable information.
Do we deliver functionality that helps with any of those responsibilities? Rarely!
Could we? Definitely!
Should we? Again, I’d love to hear your thoughts!