Passionate About OSS Blog | Passionate About OSS and BSS

Are you climbing the corporate ladder or the value ladder?

Have you ever looked at the next rung of the corporate ladder and wondered whether that's actually a job you'd want to do? When I left university, I had a fairly conventional ambition. I wanted to become the CTO (or something similar) of a large telecommunications company. At the time, it seemed like a logical destination for an aspiring Engineer / Technologist. Start with the technical…

21/10/2026 No Comments

OSS Sandpit – Hidden Single Points of Failure: Routes That Look Diverse but Aren’t

OSS Sandpit – Hidden Single Points of Failure: Routes That Look Diverse but Aren't Ask any network planner whether their important sites are protected and the answer is usually yes: there are two routes, an “east” and a “west”, so if one is cut the other carries the traffic. On the map, the two lines are nicely apart.Then a digger goes through a trench on a…

20/10/2026 No Comments

OSS Sandpit – Assurance Module: From Alarm to Customer Impact

Every NOC has lived this moment. The alarm list lights up, dozens of red rows appear at once, and the first question from the duty manager isn't "what broke?" It's "who's affected, and how bad is it?" This article provides a walkthrough of the Assurance module of our Personal OSS Sandpit Project, which sets out to answer that question. The Assurance module refers to the "Real-time"…

20/10/2026 No Comments

Shadow AI is Coming: Build the Foundations before it Fragments

Across this series, we've looked at fragmented AI investment, the rush to launch AI projects, the AI dependence on OSS and BSS, and the need for combined planning as more autonomous systems begin to interact. We've discussed coherent planning a lot throughout the series, which raises two obvious questions: If coherence matters this much, does everything need to be centrally controlled? How could - and should…

09/10/2026 No Comments

AI is Overheating: It has a Thermostat Problem

So far in this series, we've looked at fragmented AI investment (shadow AI), the rush to get involved in AI, and what happens when those AI initiatives start depending on the OSS and BSS environment. But there's another "coherence" challenge as we move from AI that recommends (humans in the loop) to AI that acts (closed-loop). What happens when multiple intelligent systems are all making seemingly…

08/10/2026 No Comments

Eventually, Every Telco AI Project Becomes an OSS/BSS Project

In the first two articles in this "Shadow AI" series, we looked at two problems: fragmented AI investment and the rush across organisations to get involved in AI before they feel left behind. Both are exciting and create plenty of activity. But sooner or later, it's almost inevitable that the AI activity will to connect to the systems that actually run the telco - the OSS…

07/10/2026 No Comments

Everyone Wants to do an AI Project – And That’s Part of the Problem

In the first article in this series, about a $1.6m lesson, we looked at how AI can start to resemble shadow IT, with lots of sensible local decisions, but little shared enterprise capability. It's not just Shadow AI that represents the risk here. There's another force accelerating that problem. Right now, everyone wants to be involved in AI. And that's understandable. Nobody wants to be left…

06/10/2026 No Comments

The $1.6 Million Lesson: Why AI Risks Becoming the Next Shadow IT

AI / AN / AO (Artificial Intelligence, Autonomous Networks and Autonomous Operations) transformations create different challenges for different stakeholders, depending on where you sit in the org chart of a network operator. Business units, technology teams, operations, architecture, finance and governance all see the autonomy problem through a different lens. This week, I'll be sharing an article each day with a different, but ultimately converging, perspective…

05/10/2026 No Comments

What If Elon Musk Were Put in Charge of Your OSS Transformation?

Our last article asked a simple question, "How much are you effectively paying to stay on the antiquated side of the Buyer-Seller Chasm?" Let's be very clear here - the incurred cost (opportunity cost) of dated systems doesn’t stop while you’re deciding what to do next. Every month spent debating, aligning, lobbying, approving and re-approving is another month your organisation bears the costs of dealing with…

29/09/2026 No Comments

In OSS, Why Do We Keep Choosing the Hard Life?

I’ve been trying to teach my kids a lesson lately that, if I’m honest, I’m probably not succeeding at (yet). Recently, it struck me that the same lesson explains an uncomfortable amount about the state of OSS and telco too. And if the message isn’t working on either, then maybe it’s me who needs to think about it, and act on it, from a different perspective.…

22/09/2026 No Comments

The Telco Digital Twin Problem: We’ve Modelled the Skeleton, Not the Whole Body

The previous article highlighted how my chiropractor taught me something I didn’t realise about telecoms. It then triggered another image in my head (the first diagram below), which we'll discuss shortly. We’re getting increasingly good at building digital representations (digital twins) of networks for assurance and AIOps. We can stitch together the various pieces of a network. Devices, topology, links, resources, etc. But a telco ecosystem…

16/09/2026 No Comments

How to Lose an Order in 10 Days: A ROM-COM (SOM) Story

Telco orders are a lot like falling in love. But, just like a Hollywood rom-com, there are always hilarious twists, awkward misunderstandings, hot exes and unexpected baggage along the way. Will this partnership end happily ever after - or in therapy and divorce? Our story begins with two hopeful romantics: the customer and the operator (I'm sure you've met them). The customer’s found someone who seems…

11/09/2026 No Comments

What my Chiropractor Taught me about the Future of Telco

I recently went to my chiropractor with wrist pain. I assumed it was from years of playing tennis and typing on keyboards. That seemed fairly logical but my assumption was wrong. It didn't take my chiropractor long to identify the source of the problem. Not my wrist, but tightness deep under my pectoral (chest / armpit) muscle was the referral point. A deep (and painful) manipulation…

09/09/2026 No Comments

The 12 Core Principles that Explain almost Everything in OSS

One of my favourite OSS books, that isn't an OSS book at all, is Insanely Simple: The Obsession That Drives Apple’s Success by Ken Segall Ken worked alongside Steve Jobs in the early days of Apple and cites many of the principles that drove its success. That triggered a thought: What are the core principles that underpin OSS/BSS? In most industries, including OSS, there are a million…

01/09/2026 No Comments

Arnie, Danny and the Problem with Our OSS Digital Twins

We invest heavily in production environments (aka Arnie) and in reactive network fault-fix measures. Most OSS teams think of non-prod (aka Danny) as somewhere to test releases and patches. But if our non-prod environments were true digital twins of production, their value could be far greater. They could become environments where we simulate proposed changes, stress-test operational scenarios, validate interactions across domains and deliberately break things…

26/08/2026 No Comments

Does Your OSS/BSS Have a Power-to-Weight Problem?

Telecom architects often jump to the conclusion that more capability means better performance. Add another feature, another platform, another integration, another automation layer and the system should become more powerful. But I wonder whether a Formula 1 engineer would immediately see that perspective as a problem rather than a solution? To an F1 engineer, it's more about reduction. More horsepower is useless if every improvement also…

25/08/2026 No Comments

The Disposable Lighter has been Relentlessly Optimised. Has OSS/BSS?

As Daniel Priestley articulates well here, the disposable lighter is an extraordinary example of capitalism doing what capitalism does best - thousands of tiny improvements compounded over decades. A lighter can be manufactured, shipped and sold for almost nothing because decades of competition have relentlessly squeezed inefficiency out of the system. Yet OSS/BSS seems strangely resistant to the same market forces, despite competition across hundreds of…

18/08/2026 No Comments

The Briefcase Technique: Making Your OSS Experiences Compound

No two OSS projects are the same. One might have a different vendor stack, another a completely different organisational structure, another a different operating model or different vendors and architecture. But they don't need to be 100% identical to be repeatable and reusable. If 50% of the problem has appeared on one of your projects before, that's 50% you don't need to solve again from scratch.…

11/08/2026 No Comments

The Age-Old IT vs OT Debate: Who gets the Keys to Your OSS?

For decades, organisations have argued over whether IT or operations (OT) teams should control the OSS environment, as though it’s a binary decision. Giving one team control of an OSS may appear to create clear accountability. But, like so much in OSS, the decision is far more nuanced. Ask who owns your OSS and you might hear the name of a department (though it might be…

27/07/2026 No Comments

For the World Cup Final, will You replace Messi with a Local Club Player to lower wage costs?

Given the topical theme of the World Cup final, we'll go with a soccer story today. For the World Cup final, do you think Argentina ever considered replacing Messi with an attacking midfielder from a local Argentinian club simply because his wages are lower? Of course they wouldn't. Not because the local player is useless. Not because every role can/must be filled by a global superstar.…

16/07/2026 No Comments

Entanglement vs Adaptability: The Decisions That Will Define the Future of Telco

For decades, scale gave large telcos purchasing power, infrastructure reach, extensive capability and millions of customers. It became one of the world’s most powerful and durable business models. But scale and complexity has created thousands of dependencies across OSS, BSS, networks, processes, vendors and people. Clay Christensen showed that disruption often begins with something that looks smaller, simpler and even inferior. Incumbents keep serving their best…

14/07/2026 No Comments

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