Author Archives: Ryan

Nobody dabbles at dentistry

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“There are some jobs that are only done by accredited professionals.
And then there are most jobs, jobs that some people do for fun, now and then, perhaps in front of the bathroom mirror.
It’s difficult to find your footing when you’re a logo designer, a comedian or a project manager. Because these are gigs that many people think they can do, at least a little bit.”
Seth Godin here.

I’d love to plagiarise the entire post from Seth above, but instead suggest you have a look at the other pearls of wisdom he shares in the link above.

So where does OSS fit in Seth’s thought model? Well, you don’t need an accreditation like a dentist does. Most of the best I’ve met haven’t had any OSS certifications to speak of.

Does the layperson think they can do an OSS role? Most people have never heard of OSS, so I doubt they would believe they could do a role as readily as they could see themselves being logo designers. But the best I’ve met have often come from fields other than telco / IT / network-ops.

One of my earliest OSS projects was for a new carrier in a country that had just deregulated. They were the second fixed-line carrier in this country and tried to poach staff from the incumbent. Few people crossed over. To overcome this lack of experience, the carrier built an OSS team that consisted of a mathematician, an architect, an automotive engineer, a really canny project manager and an assortment of other non-telco professionals.

The executives of that company clearly felt they could develop a team of experts (or just had no choice but to try). The strategy didn’t work out very well for them. It didn’t work out very well for us either. We were constantly trying to bring their team up to speed on the fundamentals in order to use the tools we were developing / delivering (remembering that as one of my first OSS projects, I was still desperately trying to bring myself up to speed – still am for that matter).

As Seth also states, “If you’re doing one of these non-dentist jobs, the best approach is to be extraordinarily good at it. So much better than an amateur that there’s really no room for discussion.” That needs hunger (a hungriness to learn without an accredited syllabus).

It also needs humility though. Even the most extraordinarily good OSS proponents barely scratch the surface of all there is to learn about OSS. It’s the breadth of sub-expertise that probably explains why there is no single accreditation that covers all of OSS.

To link or not to link your OSS. That is the question

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The first OSS project I worked on had a full-suite, single vendor solution. All products within the suite were integrated into a single database and that allowed their product developers to introduce a lot of cross-linking. That has its strengths and weaknesses.

The second OSS suite I worked with came from one of the world’s largest network vendors and integrators. Their suite primarily consisted of third-party products that they integrated together for the customer. It was (arguably) a best-of-breed all implemented as a single solution, but since the products were disparate, there was very little cross-linking. This approach also has strengths and weaknesses.

I’d become so used to the massive data migration and cross-referencing exercise required by the first OSS that I was stunned by the lack of time allocated by the second vendor for their data migration activities. The first took months and a significant level of expertise. The second took days and only required fairly simple data sets. That’s a plus for the second OSS.

However, the second OSS was severely lacking in cross-domain data, which impacted the richness of insight that could be easily unlocked.

Let me give an example to give better context.

We know that a trouble ticketing system is responsible for managing the tracking, reporting and resolution of problems in a network operator’s network. This could be as simple as a repository for storing a problem identifier and a list of notes performed to resolve the problem. There’s almost no cross-linking required.

A more referential ticketing system might have links to:

  • Alarm management – to show the events linked to the problem
  • Inventory management – to show the impacted resources (or possibly impacted)
  • Service management – to show the services impacted
  • Customer management – to show the customers impacted and possibly the related customer interactions
  • Spares management – to show the life-cycle of physical resources impacted
  • Workforce management – to manage the people / teams performing restorative actions
  • etc

The referential ticketing system gives far richer information, obviously, but you have to trade that off against the amount of integration and data maintenance that needs to go into supporting it. The question to ask is what level of linking is justifiable from a cost-benefit perspective.

Am I being an OSShole?

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““Am I being an asshole?” In other words, am I pointing out problems or am I finding solutions?”
Ramit Sethi.

One of the things I’ve noticed working on large and small OSS teams is that people who excel at finding solutions thrive in both. The ones who thrive on only identifying problems seemingly only function in large organisations.

In a small team, everyone needs to contribute to the many solutions that need resolving. There’s a clear line of sight to what’s being delivered. I’ve tended to find that the pure problem-finders feel uncomfortable to be the only ones not clearly delivering.

But there’s absolutely a role for identifying problems or for asking the question that completely re-frames the problem. One of the best I’ve seen is a CEO of a publicly listed company. He had virtually no knowledge of OSS, but could listen to half an hour of technical, round-in-circles discussions, then interject with a summary or question that re-framed and simplified the solution. The team then had a clear direction to implement. The CEO didn’t find the solution directly, but he was an instrumental component in the team reaching a solution.

The question to pose though is whether the question asker is being an OSShole or an agent provocateur*.

* BTW, I use this term within the context of being a change agent, someone who contributes to finding a solution, as opposed to the literal sense, which is to incite others into performing illegal acts.

Treating your OSS/BSS suite like a share portfolio

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Like most readers, I’m sure your OSS/BSS suite consists of many components. What if you were to look at each of those components as assets? In a share portfolio, you analyse your stocks to see which assets are truly worth keeping and which should be divested.

We don’t tend to take such a long-term analytical view of our OSS/BSS components. We may regularly talk about their performance anecdotally, but I’m talking about a strategic analysis approach.

If you were to look at each of your OSS/BSS components, where would you put them in the BCG Matrix?
BCG matrix
Image sourced from NetMBA here.

How many of your components are giving a return (whatever that may mean in your organisation) and/or have significant growth potential? How many are dogs that are a serious drain on your portfolio?

From an investor’s perspective, we seek to double-down our day-to-day investment in cash-cows and stars. Equally, we seek to divest our dogs.

But that’s not always the case with our OSS/BSS porfolio. We sometimes spend so much of our daily activity tweaking around the edges, trying to fix our dogs or just adding more things into our OSS/BSS suite – all of which distracts us from increasing the total value of our portfolio.

To paraphrase this Motley Fool investment strategy article into an OSS/BSS context:

  • Holding too many shares in a portfolio can crowd out returns for good ideas – being precisely focused on what’s making a difference rather than being distracted by having too many positions. Warren Buffett recommends taking 5-10 positions in companies that you are confident in holding forever (or for a very long period of time), rather than constantly switching. I shall note though that software could arguably be considered to be more perishable than the institutions we invest in – software doesn’t tend to last for decades (except some OSS perhaps  😀 )
  • Good ideas are scarce – ensuring you’re not getting distracted by the latest trends and buzzwords
  • Competitive knowledge advantage – knowing your market segment / portfolio extremely well and how to make the most of it, rather than having to up-skill on every new tool that you bring into the suite
  • Diversification isn’t lost – ensuring there is suitable vendor/product diversification to minimise risk, but also being open to long-term strategic changes in the product mix

Day-trading of OSS / BSS tools might be a fun hobby for those of us who solution them, but is it as beneficial as long-run investment?

I’d love to hear your thoughts and experiences.

TM Forum’s Open API links

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Those of you familiar with TM Forum are already quite familiar with the Frameworx enterprise architecture model. It’s as close as we get to a standard used across the OSS industry.

Frameworx consists of four main modules, with eTOM, TAM and SID being the most widely referred to:

But there’s a newer weapon in the TM Forum arsenal that appears to be gaining widespread use. It’s the TM Forum Open API suite, which has over 50 REST-based APIs as well as having many more under development. This link provides the full list of APIs, including specifications, swagger files and postman collections.

The following diagram comes from the Open API Map (GB992) (accurate as of 9 Jan 2018).
GB992_Open_API_Map_R17.0.1

It’s well worth reviewing as I think you’ll be hearing about TMF642 (Alarm Management API) and all its sister products as commonly as you hear eTOM or SID mentioned today.

The bird’s wings analogy for OSS RFPs

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“A bird sitting on a tree is never afraid of the branch breaking, because her trust is not on the branch but on it’s own wings.”
Unknown.

Last month, we posted a series entitled “How to kill the RFP.” The RFP is a common mechanism for reaching a purchasing agreement between OSS provider and network operator. Unfortunately, it’s deemed to be a non-ideal approach by many buyers and sellers alike. One of the key concepts discussed was trust. In the context of the quote above, the branch is the contract formed out of the RFP (Request for Proposal) and the bird’s wings represent the partnership being formed.

We (and our procurement teams) spend a lot of time in the formation of the contract. We want to fortify the branch to ensure it never breaks. We build massive scaffolding around it. But just like the bird analogy, the initial contract is just a starting point. The bird may wish to come back to the branch / contract from time to time. However, over the (hopefully) 10+ year lifespan of the OSS, the contract will never be able to accommodate all possible eventualities (flight paths).

Focus on building trust in the wings (the relationship) and have faith they will overcome any frailties that appear in the branch (the contract) in the long run.

There may be breaches of trust from either / both sides during the lifespan of the relationship. But the end-game should be really clear – an early OSS churn is a bad outcome for both supplier and customer.

2019 predictions for OSS

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Well, this is the time of year when people make big predictions for the coming year. But let me start by saying the headline is something of a misnomer. I’m not clever enough to have any predictions for 2019 for a couple of reasons:

  1. There are far too many clever people working across the myriad fields of expertise that make up an OSS for me to possibly guess which might gain traction this year
  2. I’m yet to figure out whether there are any consistent patterns or cycles like Moore’s Law that uniquely define progress in OSS. On the contrary, you could claim that there are any number of metrics that might define progress for OSS (or to any individual OSS stack). But I’ll also be honest enough to say that I haven’t tried applying any of these futurology techniques to find any useful patterns either.
    Futurism Methodologies

Instead, I’ll call out the many industry-wide challenges / opportunities that are still waiting to be solved in 2019. Many of these same challenges / opportunities have been around since I first started working on OSS projects in circa 2000.

The Passionate About OSS Call for Innovation paper outlines a list of starting points where exponential improvements await.

I’m not sure if any will be solved in 2019 but I will make the prediction that the thousands of very clever people working in the OSS industry will make some exciting steps forward this year. Hopefully they’re some of the quantum leaps that await and not only the ever-present, but still highly challenging, incremental improvements.

My favourite OSS saying

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My favourite OSS saying – “Just because you can, doesn’t mean you should.”

OSS are amazing things. They’re designed to gather, process and compile all sorts of information from all sorts of sources. I like to claim that OSS/BSS are the puppet masters of any significant network operator because they assist in every corner of the business. They assist with the processes carried out by almost every business unit.

They can be (and have been) adapted to fulfill all sorts of weird and wonderful requirements. That’s the great thing about software. It can be *easily* modified to do almost anything you want. But just because you can, doesn’t mean you should.

In many cases, we have looked at a problem from a technical perspective and determined that our OSS can (and did) solve it. But if the same problem were also looked at from business and/or operational perspectives, would it make sense for our OSS to solve it?

Some time back, I was involved in a micro project that added 1 new field to an existing report. Sounds simple. Unfortunately by the time all the rigorous deploy and transition processes were followed, to get the update into PROD, the support bill from our team alone ran into tens of thousands of dollars. Months later, I found out that the business unit that had requested the additional field had a bug in their code and wasn’t even picking up the extra field. Nobody had even noticed until a secondary bug prompted another developer to ask how the original code was functioning.

It wasn’t deemed important enough to fix. Many tens of thousands of dollars were wasted because we didn’t think to ask up the design tree why the functionality was (wasn’t) important to the business.

Other examples are when we use the OSS to solve a problem by expensive customisation / integration when manual processes can do the job more cash efficiently.

Another example was a client that had developed hundreds of customisations to resolve annoying / cumbersome, but incredibly rare tasks. The efficiency of removing those tasks didn’t come close to compensating for the expense of building the automations / tools. Just one sample of those tools was a $1000 efficiency improvement for a ~$200,000 project cost… on a task that had only been run twice in the preceding 5 years.

 

OSS come in all shapes and sizes

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As the OSS vendors / suppliers page here on PAOSS shows, there are a LOT of different OSS options, making it an extremely fragmented market. But there’s something of a reason for that fragmentation – customer requirements for OSS come in all shapes and sizes. Here are four of the major categories that I’ve been lucky enough to work on.

Tier 1 telcos – the OSS of these organisations tend to be best classified as having to cope with scale. Scale comes in multiple dimensions. The number of network devices under management tend to be large, as do the types of device. The number of subscribers and customer services tend to be large, not to mention having large amounts of change occurring on a daily basis. The number of process variants and system integrations also tend to be large. And being at scale means that they’re more likely to be able to justify the cost of customisations and automations – either to off-the-shelf products or via purpose-built tools. Budgets, both CAPEX and OPEX, also tend to be large. Except where niche slices of the total OSS suite are being delivered, the vendors that service this market are also large in terms of revenues, but also in their number of services staff available to service the customer’s unique needs. In the case of the telco, the business (and revenue model) is built around the network so it gets the clear attention of the organisation’s executives.

Enterprise customers – these OSS tend to be at the other end of the spectrum, even when the enterprise is large (eg banks). Networks tend to be more homogeneous, being IT/IP-centric. Services tend to be less customer-specific (ie for journaling costs at a business unit level rather than individual subscribers) but follow ITSM process models, so the service management daily delta is not at the same scale as the Tier 1 telco. For enterprise customers, the network is rarely core business, even if it is mission-critical to the business. As such, attention and budgets tend to be much smaller. In turn, this means that the smaller, self-service or open-source OSS products / suppliers tend to be present in this segment.

Then there are two categories of organisation that fit between the two previous ends of the spectrum:

Tier 2/3 telcos, MVNOs and data centres – Similar to the Tier-1 telco, just not at the same scale, which has implications on the nature of their OSS. They generally need all the same types of OSS tools as the T1s, just not catering for the same number of variants. Due to cost constraints, there may be one or a few significant OSS building blocks such as inventory, assurance or orchestration, but often there will also be enterprise-grade and/or open-source products in their OSS stack. CAPEX and OPEX budgets are smaller, so clever jack-of-all-trades OSS experts are often on the operational teams delivering sophisticated solutions on shoe-string budgets. Some of the best OSS experts I’ve come across can trace their roots back to these origins.

Utilities – the OSS of these organisations are a fascinating mix of the first two categories above because enterprise-grade OSS often aren’t really fit-for-purpose and carrier-grade OSS doesn’t quite suit either. Except in the case of multi-utilities (eg power + telco), these organisations tend to have very little service management change, mainly because they tend to have few to no external customers. This makes them similar to enterprise OSS. But like telcos, they often have networks that are more varied than your typical IT/IP-centric networks under management in enterprise-land. They often have less common network topologies and protocols, including older and even proprietary models that enterprise-grade OSS rarely support without expensive mediation. Just like the enterprise, the telco network (and hence the OSS) of a utility is not core business and can’t be justified through driving incremental revenues. However, it is generally mission-critical to the core business (eg tele-protection circuits are in place to ensure resilience of the electricity supply across the power network). As such, telco Network health / reliability and asset management tend to be the main focus of these OSS. And whereas telcos can delegate some responsibility for network security to their customers (using the dumb-pipe excuse), utilities bear full responsibility for the security of their telco networks and the critical infrastructure that these networks and OSS tools support.

These are only broadly general categories and there are more than 50 shades of grey in between. Are there any other broad categories that you feel I’m missing?

How to build a personal, cloud-native OSS sandpit

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As a project for 2019, we’re considering the development of a how-to training course that provides a step-by-step guide to build your own OSS sandpit to play with. It will be built around cloud-native and open-source components. It will be cutting-edge and micro-scaled (but highly scalable in case you want to grow it).

Does this sound like something you’d be interested in hearing more about?

Like or comment if you’d like us to keep you across this project in 2019.

I’d love to hear your thoughts on what the sandpit should contain. What would be important to you? We already have a set of key features identified, but will refine it based on community feedback.

GE undergoes another re-structure. Does it unlock a competitive advantage?

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GE has just announced plans to establish a new, independent company focused on building a comprehensive Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) software portfolio.

The spun out company will “start with $1.2 billion in annual software revenue and an existing global industrial customer base. The company is intended to be a GE wholly-owned, independently run business with a new brand and identity, its own equity structure, and its own Board of Directors. The proposed new organization aims to bring together GE Digital’s industry-leading IIoT solutions including the Predix platform, Asset Performance Management, Historian, Automation (HMI/SCADA), Manufacturing Execution Systems, Operations Performance Management, and the GE Power Digital and Grid Software Solutions businesses.”

A couple of months ago, we posed the question about cross-over use-cases / functionality / products / data / process between IoT platforms and OSS.

Sure, there are fundamental differences between what a sensor network management platform (ooops, should I call that SNMP? That won’t cause any confusion will it??) and what an OSS does. However, there seems to be enough commonality and potential for shared insight to collude.

As far as I’ve ascertained (happy to be told otherwise), GE is the only organisation that has significant offerings in both spaces – Predix in sensor network management and a multitude of OSS / asset tools including Smallworld. Up until now, I understand that Predix and OSS have been kept in separate siloes by GE. Placing the two sets of assets together in the new, as yet unnamed, digital business increases the likelihood of collaboration surely.

If GE really is the only organisation at the Venn-Diagram convergence of IOT and OSS platforms, then it holds a competitive advantage in that niche. The only question that remains is to identify the use-cases and customers that the niche (and its functionality) is relevant to, if any.

PS. Just as an aside, the restructure also includes the announcement that GE is divesting a majority stake in ServiceMax, a product that is often bundled with its OSS offers, which it bought for $916M back in 2016. Silver Lake, a private equity firm will take over that stake in early 2019.

What to read from a simple little OSS job advertisement from AWS

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Not sure if you noticed, but AWS posted this job advertisement on LinkedIn a couple of days ago – Business Portfolio Leader – Telecom OSS/BSS Solutions.

The advertisement includes the following text:
“Amazon Web Services (AWS) is leading the next paradigm shift in computing and is looking for a world class candidate to manage an elite portfolio of strategic AWS technology partners focused on the Operation support System (OSS) and Business Support System (BSS) applications within telecommunications segment. Your job will be to use these strategic partners to develop OSS and BSS applications on AWS infrastructure and platform.”

How do you read this advertisement? I have a few different perspectives to pose to you:

I can’t predict AWS’ future success with this initiative, but I’m assuming they’re creating the role because they see a big opportunity that they wish to capture. They have plenty of places they could otherwise invest, so they must believe the opportunity is big (eg the industry of OSS suppliers selling to CSPs is worth multi-billions of dollars and is waiting to be disrupted).

OSS/BSS are typically seen by CSPs as a very expensive (and risky) cost of doing business. I’m certain there’s a business model for any organisation (possibly AWS and its tech partners) that can significantly improve the OSS/BSS delivery costs/risks for CSPs.

The ad identifies CSPs (specifically the term, “major telecom infrastructure providers”) as the target customer. You could pose the concept that the CSPs won’t want to support a competitor in AWS. The CSPs I’m dealing with can’t get close to matching AWS cost structures so are partnering with AWS etc. Not just for private cloud, but also public and hybrid cloud too. The clip-the-ticket / partnership selling model appears to be becoming more common for telcos globally, so the fear-of-competition barrier “seems” to be coming down a little.

The other big challenge facing the role is network and data security. What’s surprised me most are core network services like directory services (used for internal authentication/AAA purposes). I never thought I’d see these outsourced to third-party cloud providers, but have seen the beginnings of it recently. If CSPs consume those, then OSS/BSS must be up for grabs at some CSPs too. For example, I’d imagine that OSS/BSS tools were amongst the 1,000 business apps that Verizon is moving to AWS.

The really interesting future consideration could be the advanced innovation that AWS et al could bring to the OSS space, and in ways that the telcos and OSS suppliers simply can’t. This recent post showed Google’s intent to bring AI to network operations. It could revolutionise the OSS/BSS industry. Not just for CSPs, but for their customers as well (eg their enterprise-grade OSS). Could it even represent another small step towards the OSS Doomsday Scenario posed here?

And just who are the “strategic partners” that AWS is referring to? I assume this old link might give at least one clue.

I’m certainly no Nostradamus, so I’d love to get your opinions on what ramifications this strategic hire will have on the OSS/BSS industry we know today.

How to kill the OSS RFP (part 4)

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This is the fourth, and final part (I think) in the series on killing the OSS RFI/RFP process, a process that suppliers and customers alike find to be inefficient. The concept is based on an initiative currently being investigated by TM Forum.

The previous three posts focused on the importance of trusted partnerships and the methods to develop them via OSS procurement events.

Today’s post takes a slightly different tack. It proposes a structural obsolescence that may lead to the death of the RFP. We might not have to kill it. It might die a natural death.

Actually, let me take that back. I’m sure RFPs won’t die out completely as a procurement technique. But I can see a time when RFPs are far less common and significantly different in nature to today’s procurement events.

How??
Technology!
That’s the answer all technologists cite to any form of problem of course. But there’s a growing trend that provides a portent to the future here.

It comes via the XaaS (As a Service) model of software delivery. We’re increasingly building and consuming cloud-native services. OSS of the future, the small-grid model, are likely to consume software as services from multiple suppliers.

And rather than having to go through a procurement event like an RFP to form each supplier contract, the small grid model will simply be a case of consuming one/many services via API contracts. The API contract (eg OpenAPI specification / swagger) will be available for the world to see. You either consume it or you don’t. No lengthy contract negotiation phase to be had.

Now as mentioned above, the RFP won’t die, but evolve. We’ll probably see more RFPs formed between customers and the services companies that will create customised OSS solutions (utilising one/many OSS supplier services). And these RFPs may not be with the massive multinational services companies of today, but increasingly through smaller niche service companies. These micro-RFPs represent the future of OSS work, the gig economy, and will surely be facilitated by smart-RFP / smart-contract models (like the OSS Justice League model).

How to kill the OSS RFP (part 3)

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As the title suggests, this is the third in a series of articles spawned by TM Forum’s initiative to investigate better procurement practices than using RFI / RFP processes.

There’s no doubt the RFI / RFP / contract model can be costly and time-consuming. To be honest, I feel the RFI / RFP process can be a reasonably good way of evaluating and identifying a new supplier / partner. I say “can be” because I’ve seen some really inefficient ones too. I’ve definitely refined and improved my vendor procurement methodology significantly over the years.

I feel it’s not so much the RFI / RFP that needs killing (significant disruption maybe), but its natural extension, the contract development and closure phase that can be significantly improved.

As mentioned in the previous two parts of this series (part 1 and part 2), the main stumbling block is human nature, specifically trust.

Have you ever been involved in the contract phase of a large OSS procurement event? How many pages did the contract end up being? Well over a hundred? How long did it take to reach agreement on all the requirements and clauses in that document?

I’d like to introduce the concept of a Minimum Viable Contract (MVC) here. An MVC doesn’t need most of the content that appears in a typical contract. It doesn’t attempt to predict every possible eventuality during the many years the OSS will survive for. Instead it focuses on intent and the formation of a trusting partnership.

I once led a large, multi-organisation bid response. Our response had dozens of contributors, many person-months of effort expended, included hundreds of pages of methodology and other content. It conformed with the RFP conditions. It seemed justified on a bid that exceeded $250M. We came second on that bid.

The winning bidder responded with a single page that included intent and fixed price amount. Their bid didn’t conform to RFP requests. Whereas we’d sought to engender trust through content, they’d engendered trust through relationships (in a part of the world where we couldn’t match the winning bidder’s relationships). The winning bidder’s response was far easier for the customer to evaluate than ours. Undoubtedly their MVC was easier and faster to gain agreement on.

An MVC is definitely a more risky approach for a customer to initiate when entering into a strategically significant partnership. But just like the sports-star transfer comparison in part 2, it starts from a position of trust and seeks to build a trusted partnership in return.

This is a highly contrarian view. What are your thoughts? Would you ever consider entering into an MVC on a big OSS procurement event?

How to kill the OSS RFP (part 2)

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Yesterday’s post discussed an initiative that TM Forum is currently investigating – trying to identify an alternate OSS procurement process to the traditional RFI/RFP/contract approach.

It spoke about trusting partnerships being the (possibly) mythological key to killing off the RFP.

Have you noticed how much fear there is going into any OSS procurement event? Fear from suppliers and customers alike. That’s understandable because there are so many horror stories that both sides have heard of, or experienced, from past procurement events. The going-in position is of excitement, fear and an intention to ensure all loopholes are covered through reams of complex contractual terms and conditions. DBC – death by contract.

I’m a huge fan of Australian Rules Football (aka AFL). I’m lucky enough to have been privy to the inside story behind one of the game’s biggest ever player transfers.

The player, a legend of the game, had a history of poor behaviour. With each new contract, his initial club had inserted more and more T&Cs that attempted to control his behaviour (and protect the club from further public relations fallouts). His final contract was many pages long, with significant discussion required by player and club to reach agreement on each clause.

In the meantime, another club attempted to poach the superstar. Their contract offer fit on a single page and had no behaviour / discipline clauses. It was the same basic pro-forma that eveeryone on the team signed up to. The player was shocked. He asked where all the other clauses were. The answer from the poaching club was, to paraphrase, “why would we need those clauses? We trust you to do the right thing.” It became a significant component of the new club getting their man. And their man went on to deliver upon that trust, both on-field and off, over many years. He built one of the greatest careers ever.

I wonder whether this is just an outlier example? Could the same simplified contract model apply to OSS procurement, helping to build the trusting partnerships that everyone in the industry desires? As the initiator of the procurement event, does the customer control the first important step towards building a trusting partnership that lasts for many years?

How to kill the OSS RFP

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TM Forum is currently investigating ways to procure OSS without resorting to the current RFI / RFP approach. It has published the following survey results.
Kill the RFP.

As it shows, the RFI / RFP isn’t fit for purpose for suppliers and customers alike. It’s not just the RFI/RFP process. We could extend this further and include contract / procurement process that bolts onto the back of the RFP process.

I feel that part of the process remains relevant – the part that allows customers to evaluate the supplier/s that are best-fit for the customer’s needs. The part that is cumbersome relates to the time, effort and cost required to move from evaluation into formation of a contract.

I believe that this becomes cumbersome because of trust.

“Every OSS supplier wants to achieve “trusted” status with their customers. Each supplier wants to be the source trusted to provide the best vision of the future for each customer. Similarly, each OSS customer wants a supplier they can trust and seek guidance from.”
Past PAOSS post.

However, OSS contracts (and the RFPs that lead into them) seem to be the antithesis of trust. They generally work on the assumption that every loophole must be closed that a supplier or vendor could leverage to rort the other.

There are two problems with this:

  • OSS transformations are complex projects and all loopholes can never be covered
  • OSS platforms tend to have a useful life of many years, which makes predicting the related future requirements, trends, challenges, opportunities, technologies, etc difficult to plan for

As a result, OSS RFI/RFP/contracts are so cumbersome. Often, it’s the nature of the RFP itself that makes the whole process cumbersome. The OSS Radar analogy shows an alternative mindset.

Mark Newman of TM Forum states, “…the telecoms industry is transitioning to a partnership model to benefit from innovative new technologies and approaches, and to make decisions and deploy new capabilities more quickly.”
The trusted partnership model is ideal. It allows both parties to avoid the contract development phase and deliver together efficiently. The challenge is human nature (ie we come back to trust).

I wonder whether there is merit in using an independent arbiter? A customer uses the RFI/RFP approach to find a partner or partners, but then all ongoing work is evaluated by the arbiter to ensure balance / trust is maintained between customer (and their need for fair pricing, quality products, etc) and supplier (and their need for realistic requirements, reasonable payment times, etc).

I’d love to hear your thoughts and experiences around partnerships that have worked well (or why they’ve worked badly). Have you ever seen examples where the arbitration model was (or wasn’t) helpful?

Why does everyone know an operator’s business better than the operator?

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The headline today blatantly steals from a post by William Webb. You can read his entire, brilliant post here. All quotes below are from the article.

William’s concept aligns quite closely with yesterday’s article regarding external insights that don’t quite marry up with the real situation faced by operators.

“At the Great Telco Debate this week there was no shortage of advice for operators. Some counselled them to move up the value chain or branch out into related areas. Others to build “it” so that they would come… But there were no operators actually talking about doing these things.”
Funny because it’s true.

“In most industries the working assumption is that a company knows its customers better than outsiders… But this assumption of knowing your customers seems not to hold in the mobile telecoms industry. It appears that the industry assumes that the mobile operators do not know their customers, but that they – the suppliers generally – understand them better.”
Interesting. So this is a case of the suppliers purportedly knowing their customer (the operators) but also their customer’s customer (the end-users of comms services). This concept is almost definitely true of network suppliers. I don’t feel that this is common for OSS suppliers though. In fact it’s an area that could definitely be improved upon – an awareness of our customers’ customers.

“At the Great Telco Debate, Nokia spoke about how the telcos needed to be bold, to build networks [eg 5G] for which there was no current business plan on the basis that revenue streams would materialise. Telling your customer to do something which cannot be justified economically seems a risky way to ensure a good long-term relationship.”

I actually laughed out loud at the truth behind this one. So many related stories to tell. Another day perhaps!

“The operators have been advised for decades that they are in a business that is increasingly becoming a utility and that they need to “move up the value chain” or find some other growth opportunity. This advice seems to be predicated on the view that nobody wants to be a utility, that it is essential for organisations to grow, and that moving around the value chain is easy to do. All merit further investigation. Utility businesses are stable, low-risk and normally profitable. Many companies do not grow but thrive nevertheless. But most problematic, mobile operators have been trying to “move up the value chain” for many years, with conspicuous lack of success.”

The CSP vs DSP business model. There is absolutely a position for both speeds in the telco marketplace. Which is better? Depends on your investment objectives and risk/reward profile.

“Most operators, sensibly, appear to be ignoring all this unsolicited advice and getting on with running their networks reliably while delivering ever-more data capacity for ever-lower tariffs. Of course, they listen to ideas emanating from around the industry, but they know their business, their financial constraints, and their competitive and regulatory environment.”

As indicated in yesterday’s post, every client situation is different. We might look at the technical similarities between projects, but differences go beyond that. A supplier or consultant can’t easily replace local knowledge across financial and regulatory environments especially.

OSS answers that are simple but wrong vs complex but right

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“We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills…”
John F Kennedy.

Let’s face it. The business of running a telco is complex. The business of implementing an OSS is complex. The excitement about working in our industry probably stems from the challenges we face, but the impact we can make if/when we overcome them.

The cartoon below tells a story about telco and OSS consulting (I’m ignoring the “Science vs everything else” box for the purpose of this post, focusing only on the simple vs complex sign-post).

Simple vs Complex

I was recently handed a brochure from a consulting firm that outlined a step-by-step transformation approach for comms service providers of different categories. It described quarter-by-quarter steps to transform across OSS, BSS, networks, etc. Simple!

The problem with their prescriptive model was that they’d developed a stereotype for each of the defined carrier categories. By stepping through the model and comparing against some of my real clients, it was clear that their transformation approaches weren’t close to aligning to any of those clients’ real situations.

Every single assignment and customer has its own unique characteristics, their own nuances across many layers. Nuances that in some cases are never even visible to an outsider / consultant. Trying to prepare generic, but prescriptive transformation models like this would seem to be a futile exercise.

I’m all for trying to bring repeatable methodologies into consulting assignments, but they can only act as general guidelines that need to be moulded to local situations. I’m all for bringing simplification approaches to consultancies too, as reflected by the number of posts that are categorised as “Simplification” here on PAOSS. We sometimes make things too complex, so we can simplify, but this definitely doesn’t imply that OSS or telco transformations are simple. There is no one-size-fits-all approach.

Back to the image above, there’s probably another missing arrow – Complex but wrong! And perhaps another answer with no specific path – Simple, but helpful in guiding us towards the summit / goal.

I can understand why telcos get annoyed with us consultants telling them how they should run their business, especially consultants who show no empathy for the challenges faced.

But more on that tomorrow!

The Theory of Evolution, OSS evolution

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“Evolution says that biological change is a property of populations — that every individual is a trial run of an experimental combination of traits, and that at the end of the trial, you are done and discarded, and the only thing that matters is what aggregate collection of traits end up in the next generation. The individual is not the focus, the population is. And that’s hard for many people to accept, because their entire perception is centered on self and the individual.”
FreeThoughtBlog.

Have we almost reached the point where the same can be said for OSS workflows? In the past (and the present?) we had pre-defined process flows. There may be an occasional if/else decision gate, but we could capture most variants on a process diagram. These pre-defined processes were / are akin to a production line.

Process diagrams are becoming harder to lock down as our decision trees get more complicated. Technologies proliferate, legacy product lines don’t get obsoleted, the number of customer contact channels increases. Not only that, but we’re now marketing to a segment of one, treating every one of our customers as unique, whilst trying not to break our OSS / BSS.

Do we have the technology yet that allows each transaction / workflow instance to just be treated as an experimental combination of attributes / tasks? More importantly, do we have the ability to identify any successful mutations that allow the population (ie the combination of all transactions) to get progressively better, faster, stronger.

It seems that to get to CX nirvana, being able to treat every customer completely uniquely, we need to first master an understanding of the population at scale. Conversely, to achieve the benefits of scale, we need to understand and learn from every customer interaction uniquely.

That’s evolution. The benchmark sets the pattern for future workflows until a variant / mutation identifies a better benchmark to establish the new pattern for future workflows, which continues.

The production line workflow model of the past won’t get us there. We need an evolution workflow model that is designed to accommodate infinite optionality and continually learn from it.

Does such a workflow tool exist yet? Actually, it’s more than a workflow tool. It’s a continually improving loop workflow.