Your OSS – asset or liability?

An asset is something that puts money into your pocket every month. A liability takes money out.

Based on those very simple terms, is your OSS an asset or a liability? If a liability, does it aspire to be an asset? By that, I mean are you actively doing stuff to make it profitable in its own right, or are you happy to just apportion the cost of your OSS out across the “asset” business units every month?

The diagram below shows what is known as The Whale Curve. It provides a graph of the relative profitability of each product in your product mix. Both are generating revenues, but assets are on the left, liabilities on the right.
The Whale Curve

Can your OSS even be plotted on this graph or is it just dragging all the products down by cost apportionment?

Even if you are unable to productise your OSS, one simple mindset shift changes OSS asset perception – talk in business outcomes or results, never in deliverables or functionalities.

For example, a business outcome is,”our new OSS allows us to activate customer services (and turn on revenue) 5 days faster than our competitors (on average).” The same thing stated in functionality-speak is, “Our new OSS uses machine learning to automate the customer design and build process.”

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