Passionate About OSS Blog | Passionate About OSS and BSS

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

Custom or Flexible OSS?

“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…

25/02/2013 No Comments

Landing Pages

"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…

24/02/2013 No Comments

The OSS Business Case Builder has been released

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.

24/02/2013 No Comments

The value of your time

"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…

23/02/2013 No Comments

What if your OSS was obsolesced

"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…

22/02/2013 No Comments

Waiting for the Moonshot

"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,…

21/02/2013 No Comments

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