Six blind men and an OSS elephant
The concept of digital transformation can be massive… or it can stem from something much smaller. In digital transformation, there’s a mantra of simplify then transform. That makes perfect sense, in alignment with, “The chess-board analogy,” but often overlooked. But there’s another simplification perspective to take. Let’s take the 6 blind men and the elephant […]
Accomplishing the incredible seems normal
“Jon: I started listening to audiobooks and podcasts 4-8 hours a day. James: Why was that your goal? Jon: If you spend the majority of your time in worlds where people are accomplishing incredible things, all of a sudden that starts to seem normal.” Podcast discussion between Jon Morrow and James Altucher. The great thing […]
TM Forum Melbourne Local Chapter
I enjoyed catching up with a few old friends and some new acquaintances at a TM Forum local chapter event last night in Melbourne. OSS vendor, DGiT, kindly hosted the event and TM Forum President Mike Lawrey shared some great insights in a speech ahead of TM Forum Live kicking off in Nice in the […]
Centre of attention
There are a lot of OSS experts out there. There are a lot of people who know an extraordinary level of detail about certain aspects of OSS. I sure do admire those people. But do you know what? The people who I admire even more are the ones who understand the big picture. Knowing the […]
Digital twins
“Well-designed digital twins based on business priorities have the potential to significantly improve enterprise decision making. Enterprise architecture and technology innovation leaders must factor digital twins into their Internet of Things architecture and strategy” Gartner’s Top 10 Technology Trends. Digital twinning has established some buzz, particularly in IoT circles lately. Digital twins are basically digital […]
Designing your way out of jeopardy
In an earlier post entitled, “Looking Forward to Jeopardy and Fall-outs,” I described a method for projecting forward to the likelihood of a design falling into a failure state and using that data to drive continual improvement. Not only that, but to drive the future of self-service telco designs, as I’ll describe today! The diagram […]
Kafka stands before the law
Many of you will have heard of Kafka. Some may not. In a similar dichotomy, today I’ll take two tangents on Kafka. The binding comes from Jay Kreps, the founder of Kafka the distributed streaming messaging system, who also happened to enjoy Franz Kafka’s writings and named his open-source project after the writer. I’d become […]
Virgin Media selects Netcracker
Virgin Media Leverages Netcracker’s Managed Services for Revenue Management. Netcracker Technology announced that Virgin Media has expanded its relationship with Netcracker by selecting it as the managed services provider of choice for its Revenue Management solution. By using Netcracker’s Managed Services, Virgin Media will be able to scale more flexibly while reducing the cost of […]
The implications of a handshake
The handshake analogy compares: The number of people at a gathering to the number of handshakes required to greet them all; with The number of systems in an environment to the number of interfaces required to inter-link them (and associated complexity)). 1 person (system) = 0 handshakes (ie nobody else to shake hands with => 0 […]
Total eclipse of the start-up
. Did you notice that I was channeling Bonnie Tyler in the title there? No? No matter… The concept in the diagram above is courtesy of Roger Gibson (yes, I made you [more] famous Roger). Obviously, it is showing that business models and technology are increasingly overlapping. This simple diagram also shows why the business/technology […]
OSS chat bots
“Some pilots are proving quite interesting in enhancing Network Operations. Especially when AI / ML is used in the form of Natural language processing – NOC operators are talking to a ML system in natural language and asking questions in context to an alarm about deep topics ( BGP, 4G eUTRAN, etc). Do more with […]
Communications Support Systems (CSS)
Have you ever worked in a big telco (or any large organisation for that matter)? Have you ever noticed the disconnection in knowledge / information? On a recent project, I was brought in as an external consultant to find potential improvements to one business unit’s specific key performance indicator (KPI). As a consultant, my role […]
Looking forward to jeopardy and fall-outs
When we find that orders have gone into (are about to go into) a jeopardy state or a fall-out state, the experts are brought in and tend to work backwards to identify the problem and resolve it. But what if our OSS were able to predict the likelihood of future failure and present that information […]
Out-running the bear
“A bear jumps out of a bush and starts chasing two hikers. They both start running for their lives, but then one of them stops to put on his running shoes. His friends says, “What are you doing? You can’t out-run a bear!” His friend replies, “I don’t have to out-run the bear. I only […]
OSS are too important to be just cost centres
When we distill it down, what are telcos selling? They’re selling connections. Whether it’s connecting with information, a group, another person, even a virtual assistant or machine-to-machine, we tend to use communications services to connect. Networks are an important component to establish those connections. OSS go a step further. They help to establish a connection […]
Omni-experience orchestration
I’ve been seeing a lot of references to continual development methodologies lately (ie references to agile, DevOps, CI/CD, etc). Quotes like focus on projects rather than the mission statement, focus on products rather than projects, etc. The core principle is in chunking workload down into modular pieces that can be implemented to give flexibility and […]
Just a month to go until my first talk at TM Forum Live
It’s only a month til TM Forum Live kicks off for 2017. I’m scheduled to give a talk on microservices (amongst other things). Drop me a line if you’re going too and would like to catch up in Nice.
The greatest currency is success
Whether it’s at an individual, business unit or organisational level, demonstrated achievement on OSS projects tends to lead to greater opportunities and rewards. There are so many OSS projects underway globally and so much expertise required, but there are a high proportion of projects that don’t deliver or are currently stagnating. This means opportunity. However, […]
Bending over backwards
Over the years, I’ve dealt with (and worked with) many vendors, as I’m sure you have too. Some will bend over backwards to help their customers (or potential customers) out, finding workarounds to their own internal rules to help make something good happen. Others will persuade their customers into signing a contract before bending their […]
A thousand AI flowers to bloom for OSS?
“AI startups are becoming cheaper and easier to build, because many of the underlying technologies are now mature enough to apply predictably, and because of the declining cost of cloud computing – including many AI as a service products on AWS and Google Cloud. I liken this development to the time when cloud computing first […]