Passionate About OSS Blog | Passionate About OSS and BSS

Two Exciting OSS Situation Enrichment Innovations

OSS have long been used to enrich operator experiences in many different ways. Raw alarms are cross-linked and enriched with inventory data to provide enhanced information (eg make/model, nearest neighbour, etc) to give operators in the NOC additional information to help them diagnose and repair. Inventory data is enriched with GIS / map data to provide equipment location, map views of assets and connectivity views to…

11/01/2022 No Comments

The Secret Truth About OSS Innovation Limitations

It's said that the best way to sell hardware is to have compelling software and the best way to sell network services is to have compelling information to share. In the halcyon years for the telcos, they had both the network services and the singular mechanism for sharing compelling information. Voice / telephony was THE "compelling information sharing platform (CISP)". These days, compelling information is ultimately…

04/01/2022 No Comments

How to Maintain Control of your OSS in a Cloud Outage

There was a brilliant article from Matt Kapko over at SDXCentral last week entitled, "AWS Outage Stresses Telco Cloud Challenges." It specifically highlighted lengthy outages on AWS in December and the downstream impact cloud outages can have for telcos that have dependencies on third-party cloud providers. "The benefits of public cloud are clear — efficiency, scalability, and the ability to consolidate functions with less equipment. For telco…

20/12/2021 No Comments

Is there an air-gap in our OSS innovation super-loops?

If you work in an OSS/BSS product company, are you able to guess what percentage of your team spends time with clients (customer-facing)? And of that percentage, how many observe the end-user interacting with your products (user-facing)? There is a really important distinction between these two groups, not to mention the implication it has on product innovation, but I'll get to that shortly. We all know…

13/12/2021 No Comments

The Mysterious Sector 4 in a Telco IT Stack

When it comes to driving efficiency and profitability in a service provider's business, I feel there are three key pillars to consider (aside from strategic factors of course), as follows: The IT stack, led by the OSS/BSS The networks and The field services The networks are vital. They are effectively each organisation's product because connectivity across the network is what customers are paying for. They must…

09/12/2021 No Comments

How and why we need to Challenge our OSS Beliefs

The OSS / BSS industry tends to be quite technical in nature. The networks we manage are technical. The IT stacks we build on are technical. The workflows we design are technical. The product offerings we coordinate are technical. As such, the innovations we tend to propose are quite technical too. In some cases, too technical, but I digress. You would've no doubt noticed that the…

06/12/2021 No Comments

How to Approach OSS Vendor Selection Differently than Most

Selecting a new OSS / BSS product, vendor or integrator for your transformation project can be an arduous assignment. Every network operator and every project has a unique set of needs. Counter to that, there are literally hundreds of vendors creating an even larger number of products to service those widely varied sets of needs. If you’re a typical buyer, how many of those products are…

25/11/2021 No Comments

New report – Inventory of the Future

I’ve recently been co-opted to lead the development of an “Inventory of the Future” transformation guide on behalf of TM Forum and thought you, the readers, might have some interesting feedback to contribute. I had previously prepared an “Inventory of the Future” discussion paper prior to being invited into the TMF discussions about a month ago. However, my original pack had too much emphasis on a…

23/11/2021 No Comments

New. Just Launched – Mastering Your OSS (the eBook version)

We're excited to announce that we've just launched the eBook version of Mastering Your OSS. Click on the link above or here to read all about it.

09/11/2021 No Comments

Do we need more dummies working on our OSS?

I was reading an article by Chris Campbell that states, "In his book How to Rule the World, Brian J. Ford reveals the relationship between sophistication and complexity; what he calls “obscurantism.” In short, the more sophisticated the problem-solver, the more complex (and costly) the solution." Does that resonate with you in the world of OSS/BSS? Is it because we have so many unbelievably clever, sophisticated people working…

04/11/2021 No Comments

New Report – Request for OSS/BSS Innovations

Over the next couple of months we’re planning to create a very visual report that highlights the 25 Most Exciting Innovations in OSS/BSS for 2022, expected to be ready for release in early Feb 2022. [Ed: the report has now been released and can be found here - https://passionateaboutoss.com/innovation2022 ] It will include a few succinct paragraphs about each innovation and the problem/s it solves. Would…

03/11/2021 No Comments

Time to Kill the Typical OSS Partnership Model?

A couple of years ago Mark Newman and the content team at TM Forum created a seminal article, "Time to Kill the RFP? Reinventing IT Procurement for the 2020s." There were so many great ideas within the article. We shared a number of concordant as well as divergent ideas (see references #1, #2, #3, #4, #5, #6, and others). As Mark's article described, the traditional OSS/BSS…

01/11/2021 4 Comments

You’ve Heard of SIA. Do You Know Anything About PIA?

If you've worked in operations, you've probably heard of the term SIA, or Service Impact Analysis. It's an important feature performed by our OSS that allows you to identify which services, which customers, are impacted by any given outage or deterioration of the network. Your OSS might even initiate notifications to customers that are impacted. The more sophisticated OSS might even initiate prioritised rehabilitation activities depending…

14/10/2021 No Comments

What Pottery and SpaceX Rockets Have in Common with OSS will Surprise You

In our previous article, we described five new OSS/BSS automation design rules applied by Elon Musk. Today, we'll continue on into the second part of the Starbase video tour and lock onto another brilliant insight from Elon. From 5:10 to 11:00 in the video below, Elon and Tim (of Everyday Astronaut) discuss why failure, in certain scenarios, is a viable option even in the world of…

12/10/2021 No Comments

Five new OSS/BSS automation design rules from Elon Musk

Automation has become a big buzz-word in OSS architecture. It's all about the automation. At face value that's great, it's triggering an implication of bringing tangible business value to our OSS.... Except sometimes it's not. Our industry consists of so many incredibly clever engineers who love solving problems, which is great. The problem with automations is our engineers can leap straight to the automation as being…

07/10/2021 No Comments

Zooming in and out of your OSS

Our previous post talked about using the following frame of reference to think bigger about our OSS/BSS projects and their possibilities. It's the multitudes of experts at Level 1 that get projects done and products released. All hail the doers!! As Rory Sutherland indicated in his book, Alchemy - The surprising power of ideas that don't make sense, "No one complained that Darwin was being trivial…

14/09/2021 No Comments

How to take in OSS/BSS’s Bigger Picture

We had a planned power outage at our place yesterday, so I thought I'd use that as an opportunity to get out of the details of projects and do a day of longer-term strategy and planning. In the days prior, I decided to investigate frameworks that might help to get me into a bigger-picture and/or lateral-thinking mindset. I'd already set aside three books from my bookshelf…

10/09/2021 No Comments

How we fall in love with our OSS ideas

Do you know what it is that people like / love about your OSS/BSS?Why they buy it? Why they use it? What problem it solves? How it makes their life easier? If you do, how do you know?Do you speak with its users? Do you survey them? Do you spend time with them observing how they use your product? Is it just the "vibe" you get?…

08/09/2021 No Comments

The confused mind says no – the psychology of OSS purchasing

When it comes to OSS/BSS vendor selections, a typical customer might say they're evaluating vendors on criteria that are a mix of technical and commercial (and other) factors. However, there's more likely a much bigger and often hidden factor that drives a purchasing event. We'll explore what that is shortly. I'm currently reading the book, Alchemy: The Surprising Power of Ideas That Don't Make Sense. It…

27/07/2021 No Comments

OSS Sandpit – Radio Planning Exercise

Wireless or radio technologies are making waves (sorry for the awful pun) at the moment. The telco world is abuzz with the changes being brought about by 5G, IoT, LEO satellite and other related tech. They all rely on radio frequency (RF) to carry their all-important communications information. This article provides an example of preparing RF coverage maps by using the inventory module of our Personal OSS Sandpit…

26/07/2021 No Comments

Are you kidding? We’ll never use open-source OSS/BSS!

Back in the days when I first started using OSS/BSS software tools, there was no way any respectable telco was going to use open-source software (the other oss, for which I'll use lower-case in this article) in their OSS/BSS stacks. The arguments were plenty, and if we're being honest, probably had a strong element of truth in many cases back then. These arguments included: Security -…

22/07/2021 No Comments

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