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What happens when a Software Engineer, Enterprise Architect and Network Ops Engineer walk into a bar?….. . You know that head-slap moment when you realise software is more hindrance than help? I had one such experience back in circa 2005, when I watched a genuinely brilliant network ops engineer spend an entire afternoon navigating tools […]
A reader of Mastering Your OSS recently reached out to indicate that he found Chapter 7 useful for understanding OSS-related risks and mitigations. He pointed out that this section encourages readers to contact us for a more comprehensive list of risks and risk management strategies. That’s right. So here are the top-8 articles/pages on our […]
Have you ever wondered why there’s such a big deal made of the start of a marriage (there’s a whole industry built around engagements and weddings), but there’s almost no fanfare at the end? Samuel Thompson pointed this out on Greg Isenberg’s podcast. Samuel highlighted that there are lots of products designed for the start […]
Whether we like it or not, most of us judge books by their covers. Sometimes that’s visual. Sometimes it’s the title. But here’s a thing I find interesting. Having written a couple of books myself, a lot of thought goes into choosing the title to resonate with the viewing audience. And yet, sometimes a title […]
The last four articles have explored the way some telcos are using AI technologies counter-productively today – AI entanglement, transformation planning, dependency visibility and the hazards of autonomy. The final question for this article is whether telcos can or will ever earn the right to unplug their legacy OSS. In Part 4, we ended with […]
I’ve never achieved true autonomy in an end-to-end, complex telco environment. What follows is a hypothesis. I’d love to hear your thoughts and clarifications. What I have achieved are small autonomous solutions that did work nicely, until a single baseline parameter changed. Then assumptions broke, dependencies surfaced and entire solutions + datasets had to be […]
Many (myself included), believe that recent progress in AI-based technologies should accelerate digital transformation (even if only by inspiring us to think differently about the digital systems we already have). However, in Part 1 of this series we explored a paradox. The most common uses of AI today are not loosening the grip of legacy […]
In Part 1 of this series, we explored an uncomfortable paradox. AI is being excitedly positioned as the key to telco transformation, yet many initiatives are quietly reinforcing the same legacy digital landscapes they would love to replace. That leads to a more fundamental question. Before choosing AI models, architectures, or tooling, must we actually […]
Like microservices before it, AI and agentic solutions are increasingly seen as the panacea of digital transformation. In telco circles, AI is often framed as the fastest path to escape. A way to finally move beyond the clunky, legacy worlds of OSS/BSS. Piecemeal AI projects promise quick wins, modern capabilities, and a stepping stone towards […]
We speak with buyers and sellers every week, and one word keeps repeating. Trust. It keeps appearing in buyer conversations and seller conversations alike. It’s more than a word though. It’s costing the telco industry millions. When trust is missing, 18-24 month buying cycles become the default. This is the Buyer – Seller Chasm that […]
The promise is simple: let AI handle the easy work, and humans focus on the hard work, the challenging work, the fun work. But the hard work is hard because it depends on intuition and experience that comes from years of guidance doing the easy work (the apprenticeship). So if AI handles all of the […]
I’d always assumed that more feedback loops meant better control, and faster / smarter / optimal operations. But what happens when each system has its own idea of what “smart” or “optimal” even means? Are we, in fact, optimising our way into instability and inefficiency? Could hundreds of competing feedback loops be automating misalignment faster […]
We’re already seeing it. AI is slowly infiltrating telecom, one little project at a time… monitoring, automating, optimising. In AI, we have one of the most disruptive opportunities of our lifetime, but the results of telco AI projects to date still feel eerily familiar. Are most telcos using tomorrow’s tools with yesterday’s thinking? Maybe the […]
We know telco customers want faster speeds.But is it possible that we’re focussed on the wrong type of speed?Here’s a hint: the real drag isn’t line-speed. . “Finally”: The Message that Triggered an Article Late last week a friend pinged me with a SpeedTest screenshot and a single word: “finally.” I was confused. At first […]
Ever noticed how many OSS decisions are made by people who have never set foot on site? What if your single most powerful OSS upgrade this year is a day riding shotgun with field techs in a hi-viz vest? This article digs into the quiet damage that OSS experts with a total lack of field […]
Are you frustrated by the complexity of your OSS/BSS factory? With hundreds or even thousands of systems, all trying to juggle thousands of activities without dropping the ball is like organised chaos. But what if we’re looking at it all wrong, both in the way we’ve always designed our legacy application architectures and how we’re […]
Are you worried that your OSS/BSS stack, or parts of it, might be in desperate need of an overhaul? Many OSS experts love being archaeologists, down on their knees, carefully brushing off the dust to unearth their OSS fossil and painstakingly preserving it. But modern network operations aren’t archaeological digs. We can’t just make educated guesses […]
The story of Berkshire Hathaway is a famous one. It started in textiles but Warren Buffett chose to drastically change strategy because the textiles industry was dying. You’d have to say his decision has proven to be correct. If it stayed in textiles, Buffett would almost certainly not be as famous as he is today. […]
Most OSS/BSS roadmaps today overflow with novelty and buzz. You might even hear the words Agentic AI come up (not that I have anything against it but it can be a little over-hyped at times). But this series has taken a different path. We’ve looked at how to build a model that looks for enduring […]
Modern telco software roadmaps tend to be full of novel features. But what if none of that novelty is enduring? What if the silhouette of the Porsche 911 guides us on what should be included in our next OSS roadmap? The City Map From article 1 in this series, The Lindy Effect tells us that […]
