Are we better off waiting for OSS technology to catch up?

Yesterday’s post discussed Dave Duggal’s concept of 20th century OSS being all about centralizing command and control to gain efficiency through vertical integration and mass standardization, whilst 21st century OSS are about decentralization – gaining efficiency through horizontal integration of partner ecosystems and mass customization.

We talked about transitioning from a telco market driven by economies of scale (the 20th century benchmark) to a “market of one” (21st century target state), where fully personalised experience exists and is seamless across all channels.

Dave wrote the original article back in 2016. Two years on and some of the technology in our OSS is just starting to catch up to Dave’s concepts. To be completely honest, we still haven’t architected or built the decentralised OSS that truly offer wide-scale partner ecosystems or customer personalisation, particularly at a scale that is cost-viable.

So I’m going to ask a really pointed question. If our OSS are still better suited to 20th century markets and can’t handle the incalculable number of variants that come with a fully personalised customer experience, are we better off waiting for the technology to catch up before trying to build business models that cater to the “market of one?”

Why? Well, as Gadi Solotorevsky, Chief Technology Officer, cVidya in this post on TM Forum’s Inform says, “…digital customers aren’t known for their patience and or tolerance for errors (I should know – I’m one of them). And any serious glitch, e.g. an error in charging, will not only push them towards a competitor – did I mention how easy is to change digital service providers? It will probably find also its way to social media, causing a ripple effect. The same goes for the partners who are enabling operators to offer cool digital services in the first place.”

Better to have a business model that is simpler and repeatable / reliable at massive scale than attempt a 21st century model where it’s the fall-outs that are scaling.

I’d love to hear your thoughts.

BTW. Kudos to those organisations investing in the bleeding edge tech that are attempting to solve what Dave refers to as “the challenge of our times.” I’m certainly not going to criticise their bold efforts. Just highlighting the point that many operators have 21st century ambitions of their OSS whilst only having 20th century capabilities currently.

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