Are your OSS better today than they were 5 years ago?

Are your OSS better today than they were 5 years ago?
(or 10, 15, 20 years depending on how long you’ve been in the industry) 

Your immediate reaction to this question is probably going to be, “Yes!” After all, you and your peers have put so much effort into your OSS in the last 5 years. They have to be better right?

On the basis of effort, our OSS are definitely more capable… but let me ask again, “Are they better?”

How do they stack up on key metrics such as:

  1. Do they need less staff to run / maintain
  2. Do they allow products to be released more quickly to market
  3. Do they allow customer services to be ready for service (RFS) faster
  4. Are mean times to repair (MTTR) faster when there’s a problem in the network
  5. Are bills more accurate (and need less intervention across all of the parties that contribute)
  6. Are there less fall-outs (eg customer activations that get lost in the ether)
  7. Are we better at delivering (or maintaining) OSS on budget
  8. Are your CAPEX and OPEX budgets lower
  9. Are our front-office staff (eg retail, contact centres, etc) able to give better outcomes for customers via our OSS/BSS
  10. Are our average truck-rolls per activation lower
  11. Are the insights we’re identifying generating longer-run competitive advantages
  12. etc, etc

Maybe it’s the rose-coloured glasses, but my answer to the initial question when framed against these key metrics is, “Probably not,” but with a couple of caveats.

Our OSS are certainly far more complicated. The bubble in which we operate is far more complicated (ie network types, product offerings, technology options, contact channels, more touchpoints, etc). This means more variants for our OSS / BSS to handle. In addition, we’ve added a lot more functionality (ie complexity of our own).

Comparison of metrics will vary greatly across different OSS operators – some for the better, some worse. Maybe I’m just working on projects that are more challenging now than I was 5, 10, 15 years ago.

Do you have the data to confirm / deny that your OSS is better than in years past?

PS. Oh, and one last call-out. You’ll notice that the metrics above tend to be cross-silo. I have no doubt that individual OSS products have improved in terms of functionality, usability, processing speeds, etc. But what about our end-to-end workflows through our OSS/BSS suite of products?

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