“I am not a teacher, but an awakener.” Robert Frost In recent years there has been a proliferation of professional mentoring in many fields of business. I just did a Google search and didn't find a single OSS mentor. A keyword search showed that nobody was looking for one either. It seems there is no demand, hence no supply. If Tiger Woods perceived the need for…
Read More »"For Porter, the ultimate profit potential of an industry is a finite fixed amount: the only question is who is going to get which share of it.Sound business is however unlike warfare or sports in that one company’s success does not require its rivals to fail. Unlike competition in sports, every company can choose to invent its own game. As Joan Magretta points out, a better…
Read More »"Even if you're Apple, it's not about you" Sonia Simone In a healthy personal relationship, each partner is approximately equal. In a healthy business relationship, there is a vast difference in balance. As a business, if you: Listen to the customer far more than you talk Give more time and attention to your customer base than they give to you Are more considerate of the customer's…
Read More »"When you think you can't, revisit a previous triumph.". Jack Canfield Just as naming conventions are important within the OctopOSS at an application level, so are numbering plans at a network level. The OctopOSS often introduces as significant increase in IP addresses allocated to network management (eg on the management VLAN). For the purpose of route summarisation (simpler routing troubleshooting, more efficient routing, faster convergence after…
Read More »"Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it's the only thing that ever has." Margaret Mead Christmas Day would seem like an appropriate day to discuss a guiding coalition. A new OctopOSS project will need a large stakeholder body to be highly organised and excited about the project’s outcomes, not just at project commencement, but through the dramas…
Read More »“Whatever you do in life, surround yourself with smart people who’ll argue with you.” John Wooden Change, innovation and product improvement comes from the collision of ideas from a diversity of thoughts. Art, industrial design, logistics, mathematics, computing, storage, automation – all these industries have improvements to offer to OSS. Surrounding yourself with visionaries and mentors from outside your company helps to promote the ideas, dreams,…
Read More »"Anyone who stops learning is old, whether at twenty or eighty." Henry Ford Henry Ford is widely acknowledged for creating the production line that revolutionised the automobile industry, bringing cars within financial reach of the common man. However, Ford's autobiography states that he borrowed the idea from the "disassembly" lines used by Armour for processing meat. He then called upon Frederick Taylor, the creator of "scientific…
Read More »"Remind people that profit is the difference between revenue and expense. This makes you look smart." Dilbert In times when it is difficult to find money for new OctopOSS projects, revenue protection / fraud detection / leakage analysis could potentially bring quick payback. I was once indirectly involved in an OSS project worth several million US dollars. The customer was ecstatic but also concerned that their…
Read More »"Combine the extremes, and you will have the true center." Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel Are we already starting to see the merging of BSS (customer facing systems) and OSS (network facing systems)? Since carriers are going to be asked by customers to be increasingly transparent, they will need to deliver combined information across the B/OSS. From a customer perspective, it might be a single view of…
Read More »"The most important part of education is proper training in the nursery." Plato Training is only useful if it is context-sensitive and interactive. If you want the best results from training, you have to build customised training for the specific customer environment (ie equipment types, service types, naming conventions, etc). If a load from production data (or a subset thereof) can be facilitated into the training…
Read More »"Faith is the great cop-out, the great excuse to evade the need to think and evaluate evidence." Richard Dawkins Evaluating OSS vendors is never an easy task. There are virtually no apples-for-apples comparisons, even within domains (eg alarm/fault management). Each product set has different features, support, etc. Despite this, I have used an approach similar to this Vendor Selection Workflow for a number of customers The…
Read More »"Simplicity is prerequisite for reliability." Edsger Dijkstra This is the last in this "So, what is it going to be?" series. Do you need your OctopOSS to be highly available (HA), with mullti-site failover, redundancy mechanisms, constant data sych, etc? Or is your OctopOSS non mission critical and doesn't require a DR (Disaster Recovery) site, doesn't need complex data duplication and only requires best effort support and…
Read More »“Products are evaluated, services are experienced” Ken Rutsky So, what's it going to be? Will you have your OctopOSS in your own cage (ie on your site) - the SaaP (Software as a Product) model. Or will you rent your OctopOSS from someone else - the SaaS (Software as a Service) model? What are the implications of each? Software as a Service (SaaS) SaaS is a…
Read More »“Striving for perfection is the greatest stopper there is. It's your excuse to yourself for not doing anything. Instead, strive for excellence, doing your best.” Sir Laurence Olivier So, what is it going to be? Is your OctopOSS going to be built using the "best of breed" approach (ie the best available product) for each aspect of your OSS (eg Fault Management, Performance Management, Inventory, etc)?…
Read More »"Life is a series of steps. Things are done gradually. Once in a while there is a giant step, but most of the time we are taking small, seemingly insignificant steps." Ralph Ransom So, what is it going to be? Is your OctopOSS going to be introduced in phases or is it going to be introduced in one big bang? Phased Approach The phased approach is…
Read More »"The other part of outsourcing is this: it simply says where the work can be done outside better than it can be done inside, we should do it." Alphonso Jackson In the second of our "So, what is it going to be?" series, we look at whether your OctopOSS going to be implemented by: An out-sourced arrangement - with a vendor (ie the original software developer)…
Read More »"Everything comes to us that belongs to us if we create the capacity to receive it." Rabindranath Tagore So, what is it going to be? Is your OctopOSS going to be built up from Commercial Off The Shelf (COTS) software components or are you going to build it yourself? In the early days of OSS, CSPs had little choice but to build their own as there…
Read More »"The ability to simplify means to eliminate the unnecessary so that the necessary may speak." Hans Hofmann OSS vendors have already developed alarm "prioritisation" tools such as de-duplication, escalation, suppression, correlation, etc to help reduce noise. Root-cause Analysis is only as good as the gurus who can identify the patterns of events and then build the associated correlation algorithms. I have a whole different product in…
Read More »"If you give a man a fish he will eat for a day. But if you teach a man to fish he will buy an ugly hat. And if you talk about fish to a starving man then you are a consultant. " Dilbert I'd have to raise my hand and say that I've done all three of these things. I've worked on projects where the…
Read More »"Engineers like to solve problems. If there are no problems handily available, they will create their own problems." Dilbert Before embarking on the choice of an OSS, one first needs to consider the fundamental question: what problem are you trying to solve? As an OSS implementer you will undoubtedly need to prepare a compelling business case, in some cases to an audience of sponsors who aren’t…
Read More »“Everything starts with the customer.” Louis XIV It just dawned on me today that OSS requirement definition never seems to start with the customer. It always starts with the CSPs operators and their needs. That sounds logical, since they're the ones who will use it the most. But how many customers have had terrible experiences with their CSP, including the following examples: If a fault exists with…
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