"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…
Read More »“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…
Read More »"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…
Read More »"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…
Read More »“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…
Read More »"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…
Read More »"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…
Read More »"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…
Read More »"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…
Read More »"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…
Read More »"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…
Read More »"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…
Read More »“A guarantee in this life: Change! Flexibility is better than predictability!” Evinda Lepin There are two distinctly differing views regarding customisation of your OSS: A specifically customised solution will deliver more efficient processing A specifically customised solution allows no room for flexibility Which solution would you seek to deliver and why? My first OctopOSS was by far my most challenging. I was contracted to a vendor…
Read More »"Simply put, Landing Page Optimization has a high ROI" ecommercepartners.net In the world of e-Commerce, the concept of having multiple landing pages is an important method to determine which of your marketing strategies or sales copy is the most successful. Now it's quite obvious that OSS are not directly comparable with e-Commerce websites. However, are there any parallels that you could draw from this technique to…
Read More »We have just introduced our OSS Business Case Builder to help organisations to build OSS business cases that are compelling to their project sponsors. As usual, we would appreciate your feedback to help make this template better still.
Read More »"The value of your time increases as you lose it" You are an OSS vendor and let's say you have a maximum of 40 programmer hours available each week. Let's also say that you have 20 hours allocated to development of the next version of your product and typically spend another 10 hours on product support. This leaves 10 hours for enhancements and configurations that are…
Read More »"I love inventing worlds and characters and settings and scenarios." Jerry B. Jenkins Have you played the "What if?" game with your OSS lately? Following on from yesterday's post about moonshots, have you done any "what if?" analysis on how various possible moonshots might effect your OSS? What if the current network technologies were superseded by a new and fundamentally different technology What if another vendor…
Read More »"Here is the surprising truth: It’s often easier to make something 10 times better than it is to make it 10 percent better... when you aim for a 10x gain, you lean instead on bravery and creativity — the kind that, literally and metaphorically, can put a man on the moon." Astro Teller on wired.com As much as the current generation of OSS products are powerful,…
Read More »“How is education supposed to make me feel smarter? Besides, every time I learn something new, it pushes some old stuff out of my brain. Remember when I took that home winemaking course, and I forgot how to drive?” Homer Simpson I just realised that a really serious oversight needed to be fixed. I hadn't quoted Homer Simpson even once on this blog until today's 125th…
Read More »"Augmented Reality (AR) represents a live, direct or indirect, view of a physical, real-world environment whose elements are augmented by computer-generated sensory input, that enrich the user's perception of the real world." MindCommerce.com Smart-phones have already generated significant changes in the way we work and play. OSS tools are starting to be developed that harness the power of these personal computing devices. A rudimentary example includes…
Read More »“Go oft to the house of thy friend, for weeds choke the unused path.” Ralph Waldo Emerson As an OSS consultant, it sometimes* saddens me to see powerful OSS systems being abandoned by organisations who have invested so much, but are now unable or unwilling to make use of their systems. There are so many reasons why the weeds may have grown around each OctopOSS -…
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