Your OSS, but with an added zero!

We’re woefully unprepared to deal with orders of magnitude.

Ten times as many orders.
One-tenth the number of hospital visits.
Ten times the traffic.
One-tenth the revenue.
Ten times as fast.

Because dramatic shifts rarely happen, we bracket everything on the increment, preparing for just a relatively small change here or there.
We think we’re ready for a 1 inch rise in sea level, but ten inches is so foreign we work hard to not even consider it.
Except that messages now travel 50 times faster than they used to, sent to us by 100 times as many people as we grew up expecting. Except that we’re spending ten times as much time with a device, and one-tenth as much time reading a book.

Here it comes. The future adds a zero.”
Seth Godin, here in his blog post, “Times 10.”

The future of comms has an added zero. IoT adds an extra zero to the devices we’re managing. Network virtualisation adds an extra zero to the number of service orders due to the shorter life-cycle of orders. By necessity, edge/fog computing reduces the load on comms links compared with the current cloud model, but possibly introduces platforms that have never needed operational support tools before (eg connected cars). Machine learning models adds more than an extra zero to the number of iterations of use cases (eg design, assurance, etc) that can be tested to find an optimal outcome.

We’ve spoken before of the opportunity cost of using incremental rather than exponential OSS planning.

If all of your competitors are bracketing everything on the increment, but you’re not only planning for the exponential, but building solutions that leverage the exponential, do you think you might hold an advantage when the future adds a zero?

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