"The true sign of intelligence is not knowledge but imagination." Albert Einstein. As this blog often states, an OSS exists to provide valuable insights into the operation of a network. In the world of OSS, Einstein is partly right. It certainly does require imagination to make an insightful connection between data sets that nobody has ever thought to make previously. Unfortunately, it also requires the knowledge…
Read More »"You can learn new things at any time in your life if you're willing to be a beginner. If you actually learn to like being a beginner, the whole world opens up to you." Barbara Sher. In the previous post we talked about the best place to use your linchpins. In today's post we look at how to best use your beginners or newbies to OSS.…
Read More »"The indispensable employee brings humanity and connection and art to her organization. She is the key player, the one who’s difficult to live without, the person you can build something around. The indispensable employee - I call her/him a linchpin - is a person who’s worth finding and keeping" Seth Godin. Linchpins or tripods are a rare commodity in the OSS industry. They are the people…
Read More »"Customer satisfaction is worthless. Customer loyalty is priceless." Jeffrey Gitomer. Okay, so you've built an OSS, you've delivered loads of training and you've worked your way through UAT (User Acceptance Testing), achieving great feedback from the customer along the way. But now the customer takes over the reins. Are they ready? Are they able to take your OSS and deliver remarkable results for their organisation? Sometimes…
Read More »"Spend a lot of time talking to customers face to face. You’d be amazed how many companies don’t listen to their customers." Ross Perot. When it comes to OSS, your answers are out with the customers rather than back in the office. Relationships, trust and true understanding of customer needs (and problems) only happens by working face to face with your customers. Even the back office…
Read More »"“Life is really simple, but we insist on making it complicated.." Confucius. As technologists, we all have a tendency to speak in jargon with our peers. Having worked on OSS projects in many countries, I've been amazed at how different the OSS jargon is within our industry, within different companies and even by different groups within a company. As such, communication gaps are common in an…
Read More »"I don't look at myself as a commodity, but I'm sure a lot of people have." Marilyn Monroe Will there be a time in the not too distant future where traditional telco services become a pure commodity? For example, will users simply plug into socket in their wall and get ubiquitous bandwidth / cloud services in much the same way as users access undifferentiated electricity? If…
Read More »“People usually act for their own reasons, not someone else’s reasons. If they do change a behavior because of something someone else has said, most of the time that change won’t stick. The secret of Instant Influence is that it helps people discover their own reasons for doing something, even something they thought they didn’t want to do. Here are the six steps that will allow…
Read More »"I think there is a world market for maybe five computers." Thomas Watson, chairman of IBM, 1943. Are OSS going to go the same way as the computers of Watson's time? Rather than being the centre of an organisation's network management universe, will they become smaller and more distributed? Current OSS tend to be relatively massive undertakings for any organisation that builds one. They are generally…
Read More »"Why do we want to have alternate worlds? It's a way of making progress. You have to imagine something before you do it." Joan Aiken. By their very nature, OSS also live in the alternate worlds of NMS. It is the responsibility of your OSS to take feeds from diverse data sets, from devices of a multitude of vendors, across a range of different technologies / topologies,…
Read More »"We don’t have many rules at IDEO, but we do have some cultural values that we take seriously because we feel they make our teams more effective. We prototyped these values for a couple decades before we set them in print. One of them is to Make Others Successful. This might not seem like an obvious value for a group of creative types. After all, we…
Read More »"Mythology goes back, obviously, to ancient civilizations and it fulfilled a real role in providing us lessons in life and by giving us heroes and giving us villains and giving us stories. I did some research that sort of got me into this topic that was looking at things like flea markets, swap meets, and also antique dealers, and they said in each case that this…
Read More »"A long apprenticeship is the most logical way to success. The only alternative is overnight stardom, but I can't give you a formula for that." Chet Atkins. In an earlier post entitled "serving an apprenticeship," I spoke about the length of time it takes for each OSS newbie to reach a state of being productive. On complex OSS platforms, the ramp-up time is probably 6 months…
Read More »“…don’t ask your customers what they like or don’t like about your product. Or what they’d change if they could. That’s all about you. If you want really insightful answers, ask them about themselves instead. You can find out a ton about you by asking them about them.” Jason Fried. Let's say you were out on a first date and your lucky beau spent the whole…
Read More »"Most of the services being churned out today are long-tailed and flame out quickly, making them ill-suited to siloed management. A new philosophy of enablement is needed, suitable for an ecosystem where innovation could come from anywhere, and this is why the business support system must evolve into the business enablement suite (BES)." Jiao Aijun Aijun's quote was in reference to BSS making the transition to…
Read More »"Testing as a Service (TaaS) - People, process, accelerators, tools, technologies delivered in a consumable as-a-service model" Ahmed Adel in this Slideshare pack Testing as a Service has its merits for performing quality control on an OSS product set. It certainly provides greater resourcing flexibility and the swarm engineering model allows a faster time to revenue for product or project development. The following three variants support…
Read More »"Be aggressive in simplifying the BOSS to the bare minimum as customers are not seeing the difference of all the bells and whistles" Alan Quayle. Have you ever noticed that almost every B/OSS project is an upgrade, addition or a transformation? There are barely ever any reduction-only projects. I often wonder whether the large CSPs have got their priorities around the wrong way. Most of the…
Read More »"There was US$21.9B spent on games in the USA alone in 2012." NewZoo infographic [Please note: I've since been advised that this link to the infographic may be malware] According to the infographic, $2.1B was spent on Massively Multiplayer Online (MMO) games and $2.4B on mobile games alone. At the moment, these games tend to be monetised via subscription or up-front procurement of an app. But…
Read More »"We need to dedicate fewer of our resources to our traditional and core products as their profitability erodes and be ready to compete hard against an unprecedented number of new competitors and disruptive elements. They face none of the infrastructure, cost and regulatory pressure we do." Phil Jordan, Group CIO of Telefónica. The statement above is so obvious, yet I'd only ever thought of it by…
Read More »"Every operator needs to understand four key things about their data: What data do they have and what does it tell them about the customer? What further data can they reasonably collect and what is its value to the operator and to other players in the ecosystem? What can the operator do with it from a regulatory point of view and from the expectations of privacy…
Read More »"The digital world is much more fragmented – an ecosystem of different players each delivering their element of the service – with a different access network, core network, computing, storage and many applications providers. And where services comprise a number of aggregated application services, the challenges get even harder. If the only person getting the end-to-end picture of the overall service quality is the user, trouble…
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