Passionate About OSS Blog | Passionate About OSS and BSS

Voracious OctopOSS

"Most consultants tend to read voraciously, seeking new ideas and insights as they emerge around the world. Because of the many dimensions of the problems we address, it is important to read both broadly and deeply." Pamela McNamara OSS technologies and techniques are constantly evolving so OSS consultants and integrators have to allocate time towards learning just to remain current. Renewal of databases, programming languages, interface…

18/03/2013 No Comments

Big shifts

In the State of the Asian CXO Survey 2012 by T.C Seow, there has been a clearly identified increase in corporate culture being an inhibitor of innovation. Seow speculates "that there is now conflict between senior management and the younger, so-called Generation Y executives or millennials who do not see eye-to-eye with their bosses. Perhaps there is work to be done to bridge the widening gap between…

17/03/2013 No Comments

You NEED to blah blah blah

“Sometimes, reaching out and taking someone's hand is the beginning of a journey. At other times, it is allowing another to take yours.” Vera Nazarian, The Perpetual Calendar of Inspiration There is an interesting trend that often occurs when a vendor implementation team begins a new OSS project. There is a tendency to start with "You NEED to...." and that's where the customer often tunes out…

16/03/2013 No Comments

Pumping out Quality – The Pottery Analogy for OSS

The following is a true story about an art teacher who decided to experiment with his grading system. It had an interesting side-effect relating to the dilemma of quality versus quantity. David Bayles and Ted Orland document the story in their book, "Art and Fear: Observations on the Perils (And Rewards) of Art making " "The ceramics teacher announced on opening day that he was dividing…

15/03/2013 No Comments

Great Man Syndrome

“I don’t subscribe to the ‘great man’ theory of the world. I’d much rather create fertile soil for other innovators to plant their seeds in than just water my own tree." Jeff Hammerbacher As the old saying goes, "There's no I in OSS Team". No matter how awesome you are or how small your OctopOSS is, or even if you are the MVP (Most Valuable Player), you're still…

14/03/2013 No Comments

New Rules

"This new economy has three distinguishing characteristics: It is global. It favors intangible things—ideas, information, and relationships. And it is intensely interlinked. These three attributes produce a new type of marketplace and society, one that is rooted in ubiquitous electronic networks." Kevin Kelly in "New Rules for the New Economy" Kevin Kelly's three distinguishing characteristics of the new economy are also what gives OSS increasing power…

13/03/2013 No Comments

Design Iterations

"Design is the conscious effort to impose a meaningful order." Victor Papanek One area of significant differentiation between OSS inventory systems is in their ability to model design changes. Of the many inventory management solutions that are available currently, many are able to model a single snapshot in time. However, very few are able to manage multiple design revisions (ie different snapshots in time). The traditional…

12/03/2013 No Comments

Live and Unadulterated Consultancy

"Consultants do most of their best work live (asking questions, innovating answers) while novelists virtually never do their work live." Seth Godin This quote was from an interesting blog entry about doing it live. As discussed in the blog post, Seth compares and contrasts between live music and pre-recorded music. Pre-recorded music sells 500 times more than live music, but it's the experience of great live music that stays…

11/03/2013 No Comments

Green Hat Thinking

“It is better to have enough ideas for some of them to be wrong, than to be always right by having no ideas at all.” Edward De Bono OctopOSS are complex beasts so it's very easy to dig out a negative viewpoint, focussing on the difficulties, the failures, the problems or the reasons it won't work. To borrow from Edward de Bono's seminal work of the…

10/03/2013 No Comments

Reaching port

"I can't change the direction of the wind, but I can adjust my sails to always reach my destination." Jimmy Dean When you set out on a journey with your OSS, is the destination at the forefront of your thoughts? What are the guiding coordinates that you're aiming for? Every boat has its leaks. Every product has its defects. Do you spend so much of your…

09/03/2013 No Comments

Get out of your box

“Introverts treasure the close relationships they have stretched so much to make.” Adam S. McHugh Stay inside your box and you will get forever stuck inside that little box. Instead get out of your box, bring others to you and help connect others. OSS are all about connections. If you stay inside the box that has been allocated to you by job description or by title…

08/03/2013 No Comments

What most schools don’t teach

"All of us depend on technology, but none of us know how to read or write code" Will.I.Am of the Black Eyed Peas This video from code.org implies an interesting question, "Will it be as important in the future to read code as it is to be able to read now?" As discussed, whether you're in manufacturing, agriculture or almost any other industry, information technology is…

07/03/2013 No Comments

Do the twist

"When you hear buzz around the beehive, you know they're making honey in there." Terrence Howard In an earlier post we talked about gesture computing and how it might be used to manage the networks and control the OSS of the future, so the possibilities presented by the MYO from Thalmic Labs, seen here, appears to be huge. If it works as well as the video indicates, then…

06/03/2013 No Comments

Making Standards

“Don't judge the past by the standards of today. It won't work. They're incompatible.” Rachel Mead While recently reading through some books from TM Forum recently about Frameworx, there were two things that jumped out at me: The amount of brain-power that has gone into creating these standards is phenomenal and the contributors have every reason to be so proud of their creations The contributors have…

05/03/2013 No Comments

Socratic Questions

"Every other Jewish mother in Brooklyn would ask her child after school, “So? Did you learn anything today?” But not my mother. “Izzy,” she would say, “did you ask a good question today?” " Isidor Isaac Rabi Questions, by their very nature are designed to initiate learning for the questioner. But the best questions also initiate learning for the questionee. As Seth Godin stated, the best…

04/03/2013 No Comments

Fast (OSS Efficiency Benchmarking)

"The public is mad, frustrated, but what the public wants is progress." Michael Bloomberg Michael Bloomberg made his whole business model around getting financial data to traders just a few seconds faster. His net worth was in the order of US$25B according to Forbes in September 2012. Are CSPs willing to pay a premium to get information just a little bit nearer to real-time? Will the…

03/03/2013 No Comments

Order Types

"Chaos is merely orders waiting to be deciphered." José Saramago When defining a new service process we most commonly think about creating a new order. But keep in mind that in addition to ADDS / ACTIVATIONS there are other order types that will need equal attention: MOVES - when a customer changes to a new location but wants to retain the service CHANGES - when a customer modifies certain…

02/03/2013 No Comments

The Buck Stops Here

"The buck stops here!" Harry S. Truman A CSP starts with it's evolving service catalog (ie the definition of the services that it offers) and ends with the ongoing reliability of the network and associated services. If these steps, or any of the other steps in between fall away, then the CSP's brand power will diminish. The OSS is a guiding hand in most of these…

01/03/2013 No Comments

Flow-through Provisioning

"A common mistake that people make when trying to design something completely foolproof is to underestimate the ingenuity of complete fools." Douglas Adams Auto-provisioning is the holy grail of OSS because it is the foolproof design that allows CSPs to reduce the number of specialised network/service designers on their books and is hence easily quantifiable in a business case. What is not so easily quantifiable is the number…

28/02/2013 No Comments

Line-testing

"Testing leads to failure, and failure leads to understanding." Burt Rutan It is in the ability to remotely test a network link (ie line-testing) that a great deal of efficiency can be gained. A proficient line test tool can significantly reduce fault-fix times by isolating the location of line failures (eg backhoes digging through cables) from a remote location (eg the Network Operation Centre). Traditional copper-cable…

27/02/2013 No Comments

OctopOSS Meetings

"I want to go to meetings where the inputs are donuts, not the outputs*." Scott Morrison An OctopOSS can be an all-encompassing beast. It can impact so many peoples's lives. But this also means that the list of invitees to meetings can explode. I have a theory that a meeting's outcomes will generally be inversely proportional to the number of attendees. The best OSS Project Manager…

26/02/2013 No Comments

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