A billion dollar bid

A few years ago I was lucky enough to be invited to lead a bid. I say lucky because the partner organisations are two of the most iconic firms in the tech industry. The bid was for bleeding-edge work, potentially worth well over a billion dollars. I was a little surprised to be honest. I mean, two tech titans, with many very, very clever people, much cleverer than me. Why would they need to look outside and engage me?

As it turned out, the answer became clear within the first few meetings. And whilst the project had little to do with OSS, it certainly had (has) parallels in the world of OSS.

Both of the organisations were highly siloed. Each product / capability silo had immense talent and immense depth to it. Our combined team had many PhDs who could discuss their own silo for hours, but could only point me in the general direction of what plugged into their products. 

Clearly, I was engaged to figure out the required end-to-end solution for the customer and then how to bolt the two sets of silos into that solution framework.

The same is true when looking for OSS solution gaps, in my experience at least. If you look into a domain or a product, the functionality / capability is usually quite well defined, understood and supported. For example, alarm / event managers are invariably very good at managing alarm / event lists.

If you’re going to find gaps, they’re more likely to be found in the end-to-end solution – in the handoffs, responsibility demarcation points, interfaces and processes that cross between silos. That’s why external consultancies can prove valuable for large organisations. They generally look into the cross-domain solution performance.

As you’d already know, the end-to-end solution is a combination of people, process and technology. Even so, as the “manager of managers,” I’m not sure our OSS tech is solving this problem as well as it could. Is there even a “glue” product that’s missing from our OSS/BSS stack?

Sure, we have some tools that fit this purpose – workflow engines, messaging buses, orchestration engines, data lakes, etc. Yet I still feel there’s an opportunity to do it far better. And the opportunity probably extends far beyond just OSS and into the broader IT industry.

What have you done to help solve this problem on your OSS suites?

PS. If you’re wondering what happened to the bid. Well, the team was excited to have made the shortlist of 3, but then the behemoths decided to withdraw from the race. Turns out that winning the bid could’ve jeopardised the even bigger supply contracts they already had with the client. Boggles the mind to think there were bigger contracts already in play!!

 

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