"The Japanese have a wonderful sense of design and a refinement in their art. They try to produce beautiful paintings with the minimum number of strokes." David Rockefeller. Have you ever sat back and wondered what has worked on your OSS projects or operations? Have you been able to figure out why it has worked? Evolution is the process of refining what has worked. In the…
Read More »“Testers! Break that software (as you must) and drive it to the ultimate -- but don't enjoy the programmer's pain.” Boris Beizer. Are you new to the world of OSS and BSS testing and aren't quite sure what testing is required? The following is a set of commonly conducted tests. Some may be relevant to your OSS, others may not: Factory Acceptance Testing (FAT) – This…
Read More »"What is life without incompatible realities?" Ursula K. Le Guin. One of the nifty features of many inventory management solutions is their compatibility rules. They're effectively the equivalent of ensuring a designer doesn't put a square peg in a round hole. A sample use-case is when trying to build a 1 Gigabit (1Gb) Ethernet circuit, you can't plug either end of the cable into Fast Ethernet…
Read More »"Innovation has nothing to do with how many R&D dollars you have. When Apple came up with the Mac, IBM was spending at least 100 times more on R&D. It's not about money. It's about the people you have, how you're led, and how much you get it." Steve Jobs. I love this concept - "Innovation at the speed of software." It's one of the premises…
Read More »"We coach to generate results. And if what we're doing doesn't have a significant, positive, measurable impact on results then basically what we're doing is wasting everybody's time and money." Alan Fine, in his book, "You Already Know How to Be Great." In an earlier post, "The Puppy Analogy," we spoke of the example where a customer is unable to unleash the full potential from their…
Read More »Lightower Fiber Networks Chooses NetCracker to Help Meet Aggressive Growth Goals and Customer Demand. NetCracker Technology announced that Lightower Fiber Networks will upgrade to NetCracker 9.0 in order to improve its network resource visualization and accelerate network planning for its high-performance networking solutions. Lightower Fiber is among the largest pure fiber network providers in the United States. The service provider utilizes NetCracker’s resource inventory solution to…
Read More »"ONF is excited about this collaboration with ETSI as we believe this relationship can significantly contribute to the goals of the NFV ISG, which we have pledged to support since it was formed, as well as become a relevant source of requirements and use cases for the SDN community." Dan Pitt. As described in an earlier news report, the team at ONF has formed a strategic…
Read More »"There are people who are really good managers, people who can manage a big organization, and then there are people who are very analytic or focused on strategy. Those two types don't usually tend to be in the same person. I would put myself much more in the latter camp." Mark Zuckerberg. Who buys an OSS and why? The manager or the strategist? The one with…
Read More »"Happiness lies neither in vice nor in virtue; but in the manner we appreciate the one and the other, and the choice we make pursuant to our individual organization." Marquis de Sade. The gathering of requirements can be a very sensitive phase of an OSS, particularly in large organisations. The decision of who gets the right to provide input, who gets priority in conflicting situations, who…
Read More »“Change is usually accompanied by a heap of uncertainty. We don’t like uncertainty and in the absence of any good structure we will cling to what we know. This, in most cases, happens to be the status quo.” Dr Jason Fox. in his book, "The Game Changer." As OSS implementers, we are the change agents for an organisation, which means we are responsible for change and…
Read More »European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI), and the Open Networking Foundation (ONF) announced an agreement to further the development of Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) standards with the help of SDN. The European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI), and the Open Networking Foundation (ONF) announced that formal agreement was signed on March 18, 2014 at the ETSI General Assembly meeting in Mandelieu-la-Napoule, France. Together the organizations will explore the…
Read More »"Christmas morning. Jimmy and Susie rush down the stairs in their pj's and shriek with delight. Santa has finally yielded to their incessant requests: A sweet, wriggling puppy is waiting for them beneath the tree, adorable in his big red bow. It's love at first sight. The puppy slurps the kids' faces then curls up on their laps. The children beam. The camcorder rolls." Jon Katz.…
Read More »"It's more fun to be a pirate than to join the navy." Steve Jobs. I'm currently reading a book by Peter Sander entitled, "What would Steve Jobs Do?" Peter describes the following key take-aways for establishing a vision from his analysis of Steve's actions: What would I want from a product / experience? What would surprise and delight (noting that surprise can't be developed via user surveys)?…
Read More »“in today’s digital services economy no single company can now survive as an independent entity and succeed for a sustained period. It is crucial that organisations focus on core competency, and partner to gain access to the competencies outside of that.” TM Forum's "Open Digital Ecosystem: Business Partnering Guide, Practical guidelines for Partnering in the Digital Economy." The speed of innovation is opening up a new…
Read More »"When you think of any aspect of life or work, augmented reality is completely going to change how we do it." Ori Inbar. Here in Australia, we have a program called Dial Before You Dig, which provides information, usually in the form of plans, about underground assets for a given address. It is used by technicians and individuals wanting to know the locations of underground utility…
Read More »"If you have always done it that way, it is probably wrong." Charles Kettering. If you have a goal of creating the world’s best OSS tool, where do you start? Do you try to understand the competition and do it better than they do? How would you prove that it’s better than them in a competitive bid situation? [I could say try using OSS use-case benchmarking…
Read More »"You cannot control what happens to you, but you can control your attitude toward what happens to you, and in that, you will be mastering change rather than allowing it to master you." Brian Tracy. A Data Control Network (DCN) is the network that carries management traffic between components of your network, OSS, BSS and beyond. It's a vital part of any telecommunication network management solution.…
Read More »"Refining is inevitable in science when you have made measurements of a phenomenon for a long period of time." Charles Francis Richter. When setting up your alarm / fault management modules, the KISS principle again applies. Focus first on getting raw alarms flowing and conduct audits to ensure all are reaching your OSS as planned. Only once that step is completed should you look to augment your…
Read More »Australia's NBN Co and Biarri Networks: What do they have in common? They are all finalists in the 2014 INFORMS (Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences) Franz Edelman Prize. The Prize is the world’s most prestigious recognition for excellence in applying advanced analytics to benefit business and humanitarian outcomes. So what is NBN Co and Biarri Networks doing up there? It all started four…
Read More »"The most difficult part of requirements gathering is not the act of recording what the user wants, it is the exploratory development activity of helping users figure out what they want." Steve McConnell. When starting out on a requirement gathering exercise, The Radar Analogy always seems to spring to mind because it carries such a powerful, but simple requirement gathering message. In a nutshell, identify your…
Read More »"You can have data without information, but you cannot have information without data." Daniel Keys Moran. Data is probably the only reason why you intend to invest so much time and money into your OSS so this must be the key to your requirement gathering phase. The following provide a few hints about the types of data that might be valuable to your organisation: Asset utilisation and…
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