"I'd like to think I'm a great teacher." Gordon Ramsay. I'm not a fan of reality TV, but a friend recently pointed out that there was a common theme in Gordon Ramsay's kitchen makeovers. He always seems to reduce the menu from 30-ish dishes to the 10-ish that can be done well and become the signature dishes for the restaurant. The analogy with OSS is that…
Read More »“People rarely succeed unless they have fun in what they are doing.” Dale Carnegie. Do you have fun wrestling with OctopOSS projects? At a recent OSS networking event a number of us discussed why we were all Passionate About OSS when the consensus was that they are challenging to the point of being infuriating. But each of these colleagues are esteemed OSS experts who love telling…
Read More »"A state arises, as I conceive, out of the needs of mankind; no one is self-sufficing, but all of us have many wants." Plato. Great salespeople have the ability to convert a customer's wants into genuine needs. When evaluating new OSS products for a CSP, great OSS consultants are able to make connections that the CSP didn't even realise existed, thus taking the customer from a…
Read More »"Although the industry does not yet fully appreciate the challenges and costs of operating in a multi-cloud environment, minimizing integration and operating costs will be a critical success factor. The emergence of an industry standard reference architecture to simplify multi-cloud service management is a priority for the TM Forum and we congratulate Microsoft for their initiative in producing this paper as a strong contribution to meeting…
Read More »"By the time the phone rings, there's already trouble. When that manager is called or this department is reached, it's because someone is disappointed, angry or stuck. Illness, broken promises or a real urgency have led to this new conversation even taking place." Seth Godin. Being the OSS guru that you are, have you spent a day manning the phones taking calls from customers? Not much…
Read More »"Seriously, we are in the midst of the convergence of voice and data and that is challenging the infrastructure of the telephone companies. There are huge commercial interests in the basic technology, but even more so in content delivery and control of content." Steve Crocker. It is a commonly held belief that telecommunications technologies and IT technologies are converging. It would be true to say that.…
Read More »"Each generation goes further than the generation preceding it because it stands on the shoulders of that generation. You will have opportunities beyond anything we've ever known." Ronald Reagan. At any point in time, there will always be a next generation OSS. There will always be new vendors, new products, new services being released by the associated network product vendors (NPVs), so the OSS is always…
Read More »"Much of what is called investment is actually nothing more than mergers and acquisitions, and of course mergers and acquisitions are generally accompanied by downsizing." Susan George Mergers and Acquisitions (M&A) are challenging for their OSS teams on a number of different levels - across technology and personnel. Maintaining business as usual means that all applications are invariably maintained, at first. But the merged entity will…
Read More »"Our vision of what's important is exactly the same today, bringing together the best systems and the best software to empower people with rich information solutions." Bill Gates. Integration, or sharing data, between systems is the key to an OSS providing value-added connections. But how do you go about sharing information between applications? There are four main methods of integration between systems, as follows: Application Programming Interfaces (APIs)…
Read More »"A Mobile Virtual Network Operator (“MVNO”) is a company that offers mobile telephone services by reselling the mobile services of another carrier, usually with certain limitations, but at a lower cost. In the U.S., there are MVNOs that resell AT&T, T-Mobile, Sprint, and Verizon services at a lower cost than you can obtain service directly from any of them. Although the MVNOs often offer services at…
Read More »"The value of products and services today is based more and more on creativity — the innovative ways that they take advantage of new materials, technologies, and processes. Value creation in the past was a function of economies of industrial scale: mass production and the high efficiency of repeatable tasks. Value creation in the future will be based on economies of creativity: mass customization and the…
Read More »"Great companies build and share their mental model internally in ways that enable managers and employees to independently make critical decisions day in and day out that are aligned with the [company's] strategy." Jason Green in this article on the Harvard Business Review In yesterday's entry on mining for nuggets, we introduced the concept of changing your mining techniques as the discoverable gold went from nuggets…
Read More »"Moore's law is the observation that over the history of computing hardware, the number of transistors on integrated circuits doubles approximately every two years" Wikipedia. Would you like to predict the future of OSS? Sounds like a tough ask right? Where would you start? Personally, I'd start by looking at proven trends of exponential growth like Moore's Law and extrapolating. Examples are on the Wikipedia link…
Read More »"As I would not be a slave, so I would not be a master. This expresses my idea of democracy." Abraham Lincoln. One of the keys to data integrity is to understand the data flows between your various systems and which is the data master and which are the data slaves for any given transaction. In general, the network is the true source of truth, so…
Read More »"Democracy cannot succeed unless those who express their choice are prepared to choose wisely. The real safeguard of democracy, therefore, is education." Franklin D. Roosevelt. In setting the direction for a nation, democracy (the weight of numbers winning out) appears to have merits (not withstanding Roosevelt's comment about the voters choosing wisely). On an OSS project, democracy can quickly lead to stagnation. Democracy has a place…
Read More »"Cycle time reduction in marketing and sales deals with speeding the time-to-market cycle for new products and services and reducing the order-to-cash cycle time, which produces benefits such as increased cash flows and profits, improved utilisation of human and machine resources, decreased costs and improved customer service" S. Rao Vallabhaneni. OSS can have a big part to play in key cycle times for a CSP. For…
Read More »"Management should already be looking to new business models that reduce the risk of stranded assets destroying shareholder value, In future, capital allocation should emphasise shareholder returns rather than investing for growth.” Paul Spedding The inventory system is at the heart of an OSS. Let's have a quick look at the downstream impacts of a stranded asset (ie a device or service or other asset that…
Read More »"One challenge we faced was that product managers tend to introduce products with too many variables to manage. For example, we had an ATM/Frame service that could be configured across 12 billion combinations. Well, how do you build an ordering system with so many variables? The answer is to simplify the product options, so at AT&T we boiled down those 12 billion combinations to about 200."…
Read More »"It is common for us to receive an e-mail from a customer apologizing for not responding sooner because they thought our automated follow-up was being done manually. The key to a successful follow-up program is personalization and making it relevant for the customer." John Hopkins. Why did Apple's iPod revolutionise the music industry? Was it because of the technology of the iPod itself? Unlikely. There were…
Read More »"Clouds come floating into my life, no longer to carry rain or usher storm, but to add color to my sunset sky." Rabindranath Tagore. In yesterday's blog I discussed the aircraft carrier analogy when bringing rapid change into a legacy OSS. The CSPs of the future will need to be based around partnerships. Not just the handful of partnerships of past, but partnerships with a multitude…
Read More »"All changes, even the most longed for, have their melancholy; for what we leave behind us is a part of ourselves; we must die to one life before we can enter another." Anatole France. In the past, CSPs had such significant barriers to entry and economic clout that they could price almost any smaller player out of the market. I've seen community buyer's groups set up…
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