Passionate About OSS Blog | Passionate About OSS and BSS

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

Learning Something New

“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…

20/02/2013 No Comments

Augmented Reality

"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…

19/02/2013 No Comments

OctopOSS Abandonment

“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 -…

18/02/2013 No Comments

Addictive OctopOSS

“We are addicted to our thoughts. We cannot change anything if we cannot change our thinking.” Santosh Kalwar Drug dealers have enough faith in the addictive nature of their product that they can offer a free trial, knowing their customers will be back. Without having the deadly effects, can a free trial of your OSS make your customers addicted, wanting to come back for more? Would…

17/02/2013 No Comments

Frustration and Discomfort

"You need to feel frustration and discomfort before you can really learn." Jamie on 37signals.com blog How did you feel when starting out on your first OSS project? Frustration and discomfort were definitely two of the many feelings that I felt. The learning curve was definitely steep. And the more I learnt, the more obvious it became that there was so much more that I needed…

16/02/2013 No Comments

It’s not just your product

"When you’re building a new product, you’re often thinking about all the new things people are going to be able to do with it. Now they can do this, now they can do that. Exciting! But there’s a better question to ask: What are people going to stop doing once they start using your product?" Jason Fried on 37signals.com blog Implementing your new OctopOSS is exciting…

15/02/2013 No Comments

Be my Valentine

"A heart is not judged by how much you love, but by how much you are loved by others." Frank Morgan The same is true of OSS products. You may love your product and your customers. But do your customers love you and your products? There are many products in many CSPs around the world that are certainly "less than loved" to put it bluntly. If…

14/02/2013 No Comments

Artificially Intelligent OctopOSS

“The question of whether computers can think is like the question of whether submarines can swim.” Edsger W. Dijkstra Artificial intelligence (AI) and fuzzy logic is a field that has fascinated me since being taught the topic as part of an Electronic Engineering subject at University. The concept of machines/software that can measure, analyse, refine their logic (ie learning) and then provide feedback into the system…

13/02/2013 No Comments

Looking Around

“You can see a lot by looking around” Yogi Berra When working on one part of an OctopOSS, it might seem obvious that you should narrow your field of view to that aspect of the project. But an OSS adds value by sifting through all of the available information and making enlightening connections. Widen your field of view, look at what's happening outside your domain and…

12/02/2013 No Comments

Whacked by the OctopOSS

"A man must be big enough to admit his mistakes, smart enough to profit from them, and strong enough to correct them." John C. Maxwell If you work on an OctopOSS of any significant size, you will get whacked by an unexpected tentacle at some point in time. Do you and your team have a process for fixing problems when they arise? Gerald A. Michaelson suggests…

11/02/2013 No Comments

In the middle of difficulty lies opportunity

“In the middle of difficulty lies opportunity” Albert Einstein There are many things that spawn my passion for OSS, but the strongest reason is brilliantly encapsulated in Einstein's quote above. There are a loooooong list of difficulties with OSS in their current form: They have many layers of complexity They are time consuming to implement They are expensive to implement They often don't deliver on desired outcomes…

10/02/2013 No Comments

Re-write the Script

"The fun stuff comes when someone is not so strict on sticking to the script. You're allowed the spontaneity, and great moments can happen." Jennifer Aniston A continual improvement exponent will tell you to "Repeat the script for things that work well. Re-write the script for things that don't." Sage advice in many situations and also demonstrated by the fact that there are many Pre-defined OSS…

09/02/2013 No Comments

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