Passionate About OSS Blog | Passionate About OSS and BSS

Are you still mining for nuggets?

"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…

20/05/2013 No Comments

Who is your master?

"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…

19/05/2013 No Comments

How democracy can kill an OSS

"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…

18/05/2013 No Comments

Tour de OSS

"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…

17/05/2013 No Comments

Stranded Assets

"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…

16/05/2013 1 Comment

Ruthless Simplification

"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."…

15/05/2013 No Comments

BSS-OSS Personalisation Layer

"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…

14/05/2013 No Comments

OTT Clouds

"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…

13/05/2013 No Comments

Managed Services

"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…

12/05/2013 No Comments

Scariest OSS Roles

"True courage is being afraid, and going ahead and doing your job anyhow, that's what courage is." Norman Schwarzkopf. What is the scariest role in OSS? On one project I was in a position of leadership on a major OSS implementation. Working on the customer site, under great duress from the customer's representatives, we were developing and configuring significant functionality enhancements on an almost daily basis.…

11/05/2013 No Comments

Abundance mentality

“People with a scarcity mentality tend to see everything in terms of win-lose. There is only so much; and if someone else has it, that means there will be less for me. The more principle-cantered we become, the more we develop an abundance mentality, the more we are genuinely happy for the successes, well-being, achievements, recognition, and good fortune of other people. We believe their success…

10/05/2013 No Comments

Valuable Tripods

“There is nothing noble in being superior to your fellow man; true nobility is being superior to your former self.” Ernest Hemingway Throughout this blog, I talk of linchpins, the people within an organisation that make most of the connections and add most of the value to their organisation. These individuals are usually quite rare in an OSS organisation and it is the responsibility of the…

09/05/2013 No Comments

There are only 4 types of job

"Everything starts with an idea. This is the first of the four jobs – the Thinkers. Builders convert these ideas into reality. This the second job. Improvers make this reality better. This is the third job. Producers do the work over and over again, delivering quality goods and services to the company’s customers in a repeatable manner." Lou Adler in this interesting blog entry Adler states…

08/05/2013 No Comments

Enlist Silent Anagram

““Most people do not listen with the intent to understand; they listen with the intent to reply.” Stephen R. Covey. Enlist and silent are both anagrams. They also have one other anagram that is important for OSS consultants and integrators in particular. Can you guess what this vital skill is? A hint would be that enlisting silence is likely to help you to develop this skill.…

07/05/2013 No Comments

What’s your big data plan?

"The promised land of new data-driven businesses, greater transparency into how operations actually work, better predictions, and faster testing is alluring indeed." by Stefan Biesdorf, David Court, and Paul Willmott in their article "Big Data: What's your plan?" Like it or not, the information age is changing the way we do business and our reliance on e-everything. But it also means that there is more electronic…

06/05/2013 No Comments

Reasons to Travel

"So, young person, travel. Travel wide and far. Travel boldly. Travel with full abandon." Jeff Goins in his blog entry "3 Reasons to Travel While You’re Young" Jeff goes on to give the following three reasons to travel while you're young: Traveling teaches you to live an adventure Traveling helps you encounter compassion Traveling allows you to get some culture I bet you're wondering what this…

05/05/2013 No Comments

Taker Cultures

"In giver cultures, employees operate as the high-performing intelligence units do: helping others, sharing knowledge, offering mentoring, and making connections without expecting anything in return. Meanwhile, in taker cultures, the norm is to get as much as possible from others while contributing less in return. Employees help only when they expect the personal benefits to exceed the costs, as opposed to when the organizational benefits outweigh…

04/05/2013 No Comments

How far are you willing to go?

"How far would you go to find your passion?" Drew Dudley in this thought-provoking blog entry that I really recommend that you should read. OSS are one of the fundamental building blocks of the Communications Networks that are driving the Digital Revolution. OSS have the ability to make the Digital experience better. As a rule, OSS have so many ways to improve that almost any effort…

03/05/2013 No Comments

Setting goals and other urban legends

"What do you think the difference is between having 2 reasons to achieve a goal and having 100 reasons? When you have 100 reasons, reaching a goal is pretty much a certainty." Ron Whitaker in this interesting blog that recounts an urban legend study about goal setting. Ron's blog also provides a downloadable worksheet for planning and goal setting. The goals and action plan are designed…

02/05/2013 No Comments

Great generals get into the battlefield

"I used to say of him (Napoleon) that his presence on the field made the difference of 40,000 men." Duke of Wellington. If you really want to learn about your OSS deeply, you have to get out into the battlefield - at the customer site, with the OSS operators, with the developers, with the innovators in your field, with the CSP's customers who are touched by…

01/05/2013 No Comments

OSS Age-ism

"Why would any company pay a computer programmer with out-of-date skills a salary of say $150,000, when it can hire a fresh graduate — who has no skills — for around $60,000? Even if it spends a month training the younger worker, the company is still far ahead. The young understand new technologies better than the old do, and are like a clean slate." Vivek Wadhwa…

30/04/2013 No Comments

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