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My wife and I attended a Christmas party over the weekend and on the trip home we discussed customer service. In particular we were discussing the customer service training she’d had, as well as the culture of customer service reinforcement she’d experienced via leaders and peers in her industry. She doesn’t work in ICT or […]
Earlier in the week, we spoke about the differences between dirty and clean consulting, as posed by Dr Richard Claydon, and how it impacted the use of consultants on OSS projects. The same clean / dirty construct applies to automation projects / tools such as RPA (Robotic Process Automation). Clean Automation = simply building robotic […]
Peter Thiel (co-founder of PayPal, Founders Fund and many other snippets in an impressive highlights reel) asks prospective entrepreneurs to tell him something they believe is true that nobody agrees with them about. Today I’m asking you the same question and would love to hear your answers: What do you believe to be true in […]
“Corporate innovation is far more dependent on external collaboration and customer insight than having a ‘lab’.” Andy Howard in a fabulous LinkedIn post. Like so many other industries, OSS is ripe for disruption through innovation. Andy Howard’s post provides a number of sobering statistics for any large OSS vendors thinking of embarking on an Innovation […]
“The first rule of any technology used in a business is that automation applied to an efficient operation will magnify the efficiency. The second is that automation applied to an inefficient operation will magnify the inefficiency.” Bill Gates. The pervading OSS business case paradigm is to seek cost-out by introducing automation that reduces head-count – […]
“The original management consultant was Frederick Taylor, who prided himself in having discovered the “one best way” which would be delivered by “first-class men”. These assumptions, made in 1911, are still dominant today. Best practice is today’s “one best way” and recruiters, HR and hiring managers spend months and months searching for today’s “first-class men”. […]
“Moonshot thinking is about making something 10x better. This forces you to throw away the existing assumptions and create something bold and new. Reality will eat into your 10x. At the end of the process it may only be 2x, but that’s still amazing.” Brian Jansen‘s Book Summary: “Bold: How To Go Big, Create Wealth, […]
When looking at a telco org chart, where does the highest staff turnover tend to occur? Contact centres? Network Operations? The fact that these two groups tend to have the highest turnover indicates that their employers see them as expendable resources. They’ll never come out and say it directly, but actions speak louder than words. […]
Regardless of whose estimates you read, OSS is a multi billion industry. However, based on the relatively infrequent signing of new vendor deals, it’s safe to say that only a very small percentage of those billions are ever “in play.” In other words, OSS tend to be very sticky, in part because they’re so difficult […]
I have a really simple philosophical question to pose of you today – Are we measuring our OSS at the wrong end? It seems that a vast majority of our OSS measurement is at the input end of a process rather than at the output. Just a few examples: Financial predictions in a business cases vs Return […]
Netcracker’s Converged Fixed and Mobile Revenue Management Solution Goes Live at Slovak Telekom. Netcracker Technology announced that Slovak Telekom, the largest Slovak communications service provider, has gone live with Netcracker’s converged Revenue Management solution for its residential and VSE/SoHo customers. Netcracker’s offering enables Slovak Telekom to manage all billing and rating processes for both fixed […]
“When we talk about building capabilities by design, there are a set of four core capabilities that you should keep in mind: Designed for self-sufficiency: Enable an environment where the business user is capable of acquiring, blending, presenting, and visualizing their data discoveries. IT needs to move away from being command and control to being […]
NTT East Japan Adopts Cisco NFV Portfolio To Help Small and Medium Enterprises With ICT Cloud Computing. Cisco Systems G.K. announced that Nippon Telegraph and Telephone East Corporation has adopted a full-stack, ETSI-compliant NFV solution validated and supported by Cisco for its new Maruraku Office service. This will enable the centralized creation, management and operation […]
Guns don’t kill people, people do. Similarly, Technology doesn’t kill OSS projects, people do… Actually people with technology do. The following shows the escalation of global CAPEX allocated by CSPs over the last thirty years (in current currency).. apart from a few brief years around the Global Financial Crisis (GFC). The CAPEX uplift also represents […]
“The gameplan tells what you want to happen, but the scoreboard tells what is happening.” John C Maxwell Over the years, I’ve found it interesting that most of the organisations I’ve consulted to have significant hurdles for a new OSS to jump through to get funded (the gameplan), but rarely spend much time on the […]
“What percentage of the work you do each day is work where the process (the ‘right answer’) is known? Jobs where you replicate a process instead of inventing one… The place where we can create the most value is when we do a job where exploration and a new solution is what’s needed. Not rote, […]
OSS is a powerful multi-purpose tool, much like a hammer. If OSS is my only tool, do I see all problems as nails that I have to drive home with my OSS? The downside of this is that it then needs to be designed, built, integrated, tested, released, supported, upgraded, data curated and maintained. The […]
“The far-reaching impact of the technology revolution of 2007 with the launch of the Apple iPhone is not to be underestimated. Across every industry, Apple has had a profound influence through the psychological effect of how consumers expect technology to interact with them. People now expect good design as part of their visual communication and […]
“84 percent of employees are “matrixed” to some extent, meaning they serve on multiple teams” Gallup Report: “State of the American Workplace.” Like me, you’ve probably worked on some highly functional OSS teams as well as some dysfunctional ones. Perhaps you’ve even worked with teams that have had elements of both. Today I reflect on […]
Data quality is the bane of many a telco. If the data quality is rubbish then the OSS tools effectively become rubbish too. Feedback loops are one of the most underutilised tools in a data fix arsenal. However, few people realise that there are two levels of feedback loops. There’s what I refer to as […]
