Something dawned on me recently – People who want to save money don’t want to spend money.
That statement has more profound implications for the world of OSS than you might initially think. Let me explain.
If someone’s main priority is to save money, what are the chances that they’ll spend money to buy a product (let’s say a book) that shows them how to save? I imagine it takes REALLY compelling marketing to overcome the customer’s primary urge.
Is it the same in business? Does someone who’s been tasked with saving money for their company readily open the purse-strings in order to save? This is a little less clear-cut than for the individual case – the employee may’ve been assigned a budget to spend with expected savings attached to it.
What if I offered these alternatives:
Which is more compelling?
The “cost out” sales model appears rampant in the OSS industry at the moment – if you buy this tool, your headcount / costs will go down by X. [Did someone just mention AI?]
That’s just capitulating to the mantra that OSS will only ever be cost centres (and allowing bean-counters to dictate that costs must be reduced).
We don’t strive hard enough to fasten our metrics to the positives (eg income generation)? If anything, our OSS tend to be associated with loss-related metrics (eg network outages, faults, SLA degradation, etc). That’s the O (Operations) in OSS talking. If we only frame our thinking to building solutions for Operations, we’re pushing the figurative ship uphill to make a sale*.
Here are some suggestions on how to positively re-frame your OSS messaging.
* the “sales model” that I’m talking about here refers to internal pitches / business-cases, not just sellers from third-parties like vendors/integrators.
Over the years, I’ve often referred to The Corkscrew Analogy or Momentum Spiral to describe a mindset of incremental improvement that’s needed to keep an
We’ve embarked on a journey of trying to plan for the future of OSS/BSS, not by predicting the future, but by seeking ways to be
As discussed in the previous article, “Future Scenario Planning: Have you given up on doing an OSS transformation? (part 1)” part of the fun of
Earlier in the week, a friend mentioned he was reading “Alchemy” by Rory Sutherland. It’s not an OSS book per se, but does provide some
Here at Passionate About OSS, we are exactly that – Passionate About OSS (Operational Support Systems). We’re also passionate about BSS, NMS, or any other names you call the tools that help to operationalise your network.
