"Wherever I see people doing something the way it's always been done, the way it's 'supposed' to be done, following the same old trends, well, that's just a big red flag to me to go look somewhere else." Mark Cuban. Has your OSS been SMAC-ed yet? Social Mobility Analytics (Big Data) Cloud (and Virtualisation) Have you implemented any OSS innovations to make use of these "next-generation"…
Read More »Convergys to Acquire Stream for $820 Million Convergys Corporation and Stream Global Services, Inc., both premier providers of customer management services, announced entry into a definitive merger agreement under which Convergys will acquire Stream for a total enterprise value of $820 million in cash, subject to certain adjustments, from funds managed by Ares Management and Providence Equity Partners, as well as from LiveIt, the BPO investment…
Read More »"Sometimes, we're so eager to have an opinion that we skip the step of working to understand." Seth Godin. I'm currently reading "Power Listening - Mastering the Most Critical Business Skill of All" by Bernard Ferrari. In it, the author speaks of applying the Pareto Principle to listening. In other words, spending 80% of the time listening and only 20% talking. It's such an important trait…
Read More »"Scientists have been warning about global warming for decades. It's too late to stop it now, but we can lessen its severity and impacts." David Suzuki. We’ve all heard the stories of global warming leading to increasing occurrences of cataclysmic weather events. Further to yesterday’s blog about big data and the ever-increasing data flowing through our B/OSS, have you noticed that the frequency of event storms…
Read More »"Each year Gartner gives buzzwords a reality check by publishing its Hype Cycle report. The latest one focusing on big data shows that the industry is just reaching the peak of its hype right now, with vendors flocking to the market, customers getting anxious that they don’t yet fully understand the technology, and the expectations about what big data can do for an organization being over-inflated."…
Read More »"Ultimatums rarely work because we react to the emotion instead of responding intelligently. On the other hand, giving your partner... a choice between two outcomes is a generous act, a form of truth-telling that helps both of you." Seth Godin. One of the many things expected of a consultant is to add new insights into an organisation. One specific area of insight is to help an…
Read More »"Our brains, our bodies, our teams, and our organizational systems are not set up to tear things down and create things at the same time. Each requires different ways of thinking and doing that are contrary to the way work happens and how people behave within these systems." Christine Chopyak in her book, "Picture Your Business Strategy: Transform Decisions with the Power of Visuals." The quote…
Read More »"We looked at the areas of technical and commercial risk within data access projects, and created a combination of product features and commercial policies that, as far as is possible, mitigate this risk." Ontology website. The diagram link above shows the five principles put forward by an organisation named Ontology. It just so happens that it aligns with concepts I've discussed in earlier posts, such as…
Read More »"Over the last decade, developments in miniaturization and low-powered electronics have led to the development of wireless sensor networks (WSNs), which are computational systems with the ability not only to sense their environments, but also to process and communicate the data obtained using a wireless channel. This book focuses on a specific class of WSNs, called body area networks (BANs) (also known in the literature as…
Read More »"You get the best effort from others not by lighting a fire beneath them, but by building a fire within." Bob Nelson. Sports present an interesting parallel to the business world due to their single-minded focus on a goal, with members of successful teams tending to share a common focus. It's also interesting that the best in the world tend to seek the assistance of coaches…
Read More »"I do all my work by storyboard, so as I draw the storyboard, the world gets more and more complex, and as a result, my North, South, East, West directions kind of shift and go off base..." Hayao Miyazaki. Does your B/OSS have the ability to track each interaction relating to a customer, through all the different systems in your suite? If yes, can you then…
Read More »"Google has a plan. Eventually it wants to get into your brain. "When you think about something and don't really know much about it, you will automatically get information," Google CEO Larry Page said in Steven Levy's book, "In the Plex: How Google Thinks, Works and Shapes Our Lives." "Eventually you'll have an implant, where if you think about a fact, it will just tell you…
Read More »"(I) likened developing your people at the point of execution to training pilots after you take delivery of your airplanes." Jeff Joerres. Does this sound familiar in the OSS world? How often have you heard of an OSS implementation being signed off before training commences? Or training just before UAT (User Acceptance Testing) starts? I liken OSS training to being an apprenticeship rather than a few…
Read More »"An empowered organization is one in which individuals have the knowledge, skill, desire, and opportunity to personally succeed in a way that leads to collective organizational success." Stephen Covey, In yesterday's blog, I described the importance of providing the field workforce with tools that improve the feedback of data into the OSS, thus improving data integrity (hopefully). However, I intentionally left one tool-set out that can…
Read More »"True intuitive expertise is learned from prolonged experience with good feedback on mistakes." Daniel Kahneman. The field workforce is one of the most important components of any CSP but is often forgotten by OSS exponents. Afterall, they are the ones who go to site and physically touch the network every day - they build it, connect it, fix it, modify it and maintain it. But when…
Read More »“All content considerations should first be led from the brand. From there, make decisions about goals, initiatives and objectives. To do otherwise will doom a content strategy to being ineffective at best and off-message and harmful to the brand at worst.” Brian Bibler. I must admit that I'm pretty new to the world of digital signage. I've known of it being a carrier service, but up…
Read More »"The machine does not isolate man from the great problems of nature but plunges him more deeply into them." Antoine de Saint-Exupery. Many are wondering what the M2M acronym means for their OSS. M2M, or Machine to Machine, is sometimes touted as one possible saviour for CSPs that are losing revenues from their traditional cash cows like fixed-line voice networks. M2M is not really new, with telemetry…
Read More »GE partners with AT&T, Cisco, Intel for 'Industrial Internet' General Electric Co announced partnerships with AT&T Inc, Cisco Systems Inc and Intel Corp to expand its 'Industrial Internet' service that allows its customers to analyze data and predict outcomes. The service helps customers analyze industrial 'big data'- data so large that it is difficult to process using traditional database and software. This would help customers minimize…
Read More »"Genius is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration." Thomas A. Edison. I'm not sure that Edison got the numbers quite right, whereby the following ratio is implied: 1% = thinking 99% = doing but his point that "doing far outweighs theorising" has its merits in OSS implementations. One example is sand-pit environments. In an earlier post about Rapid Prototyping, the concept of having a highly…
Read More »“They (customers) don’t want quarter-inch bits. They want quarter-inch holes.” Leo McGinneva. As alluded to in McGinneva's quote above, OSS are only a means to an end. A customer doesn't want a Performance Management tool. They want to ensure their network is performing efficiently and reliably. If a better approach comes along, there might no longer be a need for the traditional Performance Manager tool. Your…
Read More »"Mobile data, mobile media, mobile sales, mobile marketing, mobile commerce, mobile finance, mobile payments, mobile health, and many more explode." Daniel Burrus. Mobile, mobile, mobile. Mobile devices are still getting smarter and faster, allowing ever more sophisticated apps to run on them, including ones servicing the sectors listed above. But these apps rely on data, sometimes public data, sometimes private data. Will app developers, and in…
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