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Berkshire Hathaway Discovered a Mutual Destruction Trap in Textiles. Almost too Late. Will Telcos Fall into it too?

The story of Berkshire Hathaway is a famous one. It started in textiles but Warren Buffett chose to drastically change strategy because the textiles industry was dying. You'd have to say his decision has proven to be correct. If it stayed in textiles, Buffett would almost certainly not be as famous as he is today. There are strong similarities between the textiles industry back then and…

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31/10/2025 No Comments

Want to Design an OSS/BSS Architecture to be Relevant for 10+ Years? Learning from Lindy and the Porsche 911 (part 3)

Modern telco software roadmaps tend to be full of novel features. But what if none of that novelty is enduring? What if the silhouette of the Porsche 911 guides us on what should be included in our next OSS roadmap? The City Map From article 1 in this series, The Lindy Effect tells us that the longer something non-perishable has survived, the longer it is likely…

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16/10/2025 No Comments

Turn Incidents Into Resilience X-rays: Using Network Outages as Complexity Audits (part 2)

After a major outage, we conduct PIRs (Post Incident Reviews). If we find something, we usually add controls. But when you think about it, that’s a bit like bandages on an infected wound - more layers, more failure points and potentially even a wider blast radius. The durable fix is more clinical: identify and remove the dead tissue. Investigate deeper and find ways to retire brittle…

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07/10/2025 No Comments

Can you predict the Next 40 years of OSS/BSS? The Lindy Effect might help (part 1)

When you're planning your next-generation OSS/BSS roadmap, what's guiding your decisions? Are you looking for and/or researching features that have never been seen before? Are you finding new problems to solve? That's our (my) typical mindset isn't it? What if I instead pointed you to a little-known framework that looks deep into the past to help you to predict what's most likely to be important in…

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30/09/2025 No Comments

Same Telco, Different World-views: 5 Lessons from IBM in the 1990s in Building Alignment

According to Russ Hill, IBM had 27 top priorities in the 1990s, and only 3 of them aligned. Telcos today aren’t far off. The cost? Misaligned missions and fragmented customer outcomes. When Lou Gerstner took over IBM in 1993, he found a company with no shortage of smart people or strategies or good intentions. But what he also found was a team pulling in different directions…

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23/09/2025 No Comments

OSS Buyers think they Buy with Logic… But none of us do

You're in the business of OSS sales (we're all in the business of OSS sales if we want to work on an OSS project). Your OSS sales assets are full of facts, features and benefits. That fits perfectly for every buyer who thinks and says their procurement decisions are logical and calculated. Just one problem: psychology says buying decisions are anything but logical. Want to know…

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16/09/2025 No Comments

Avoid being Shot by the OSS Woman in the Red Dress

This is a story about a scene from The Matrix. It starts like the telco industry. Fearful of change. Locked into systems they can’t seem to escape. But then there's a twist. Bang!   The woman in the red dress doesn’t just walk past me. She hits me right between the eyes. This is the Matrix analogy I have to keep repeating to myself. Morpheus tells…

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10/09/2025 No Comments

Infographic – A step-by-step Guide to building your OSS Data Governance Framework

Telcos are drowning in data, but few treat it as a managed, strategic asset. Without governance, OSS initiatives falter under poor quality, fragmented and inconsistent information. Data quality decays over time. Without the right governance, poor data can send your systems and processes into a death spiral, no matter how good they are. Taking a continual improvement approach to your data will help to avoid the…

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05/09/2025 No Comments

When a Telco Burned: What Warrnambool can teach us about Telco’s Future

Telcos are built for resilience.But when a critical exchange burned to the ground in regional Australia, it exposed the industry's greatest weakness and its greatest strength are one and the same: the ability to adapt. What happened to Warrnambool Exchange in 2012 wasn’t just a fire. It was a story that shattered the commonly held illusion that big telecom is unable to change. While an entire…

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02/09/2025 No Comments

Was Working in Telco Always Boring? 5 Ways to Reignite Energy Across the Industry

The answer is a categorical no! Telco was once the place for moonshot thinkers and industry-shaping tech. Do you remember when telco was exciting? When engineers solved big problems and OSS was a creative playground? Unfortunately, telco today has a growing energy crisis. Not just in its tower sites and data centres, but an energy crisis among its people. I keep seeing the same thing. Teams…

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26/08/2025 No Comments

The Iteration Game: Which Surprising Telco Assets get more Valuable over Time?

If asked to think about telco's most valuable assets, most people think spectrum, networks and customers. But if we think a bit more laterally, telcos have other compounding growth engines that are never discussed, to the point of being invisible. In fact, the assets that have the potential to compound fastest probably don’t even appear on a balance sheet. The quote below was the seed idea…

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21/08/2025 No Comments

From Mercedes Star to North Star: Three Cheat-Sheets for Uniting OSS Transformations

When we're passionate about OSS and we discuss OSS/BSS transformation, the context is almost always centred around the technology. But if technology was the real barrier, most telcos would already be running the sleek digital operations of their dreams by now. As we found in the previous article about telco world views, the real drag on transformation isn’t technology at all. It’s misaligned perspectives and objectives…

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19/08/2025 No Comments

Multiple Worldviews, One Telco: When our Mercedes Stars don’t Align

In telcos, everyone’s working toward the same goal right? Well, we all know that's not exactly right. Speak to the CEO, the CFO, the CTO, the COO, the CMO, etc, and you could end up thinking they're talking about different companies (a bit like the story of the six blind men and an elephant). And here’s the twist: none of them are wrong. Last week Sebastian…

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12/08/2025 No Comments

The secret to winning in Service Assurance? Updating your thinking faster than competitors

Network downtime can cost millions per hour, so service and network assurance have never been more critical. But here's the interesting thing - have you also noticed that many organisations still rely on reactive firefighting supplemented with a few rules-based automations, heavy use of CLIs, alarm lists and human-centric "tick and flick" incident management? When presenting at the annual global OSS architects conference for one of…

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05/08/2025 No Comments

Agentic Experience (AX): Is it a game-changer for OSS Design?

Many OSS UI (User Interface) design principles have barely changed in decades. These principles have served us well. But the iterative dialogue model presented by today's generative AI tools provides a totally new framework for OSS UI reimagination. Today we’ll explore 18 Agentic Experience (AX) principles that we've picked out of a letter shared by Greg Isenberg. We'll help you to evaluate which ones are relevant…

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01/08/2025 No Comments

Tips from the Tee Box: How Golf and the Gym can help You get the OSS of Your Dreams

Everyone’s watching. You’re on the first tee at the golf course, adrenaline surging. The fairway stretches out in front of you, full of promise, but hesitation creeps in. Your grip tightens. Not because you don’t want to play, or because the drive itself terrifies you. It's because you’re unsure what might happen if you miss the fairway and end up deep in the rough. The embarrassment. The…

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24/07/2025 No Comments

From War and Peace to The Very Hungry Caterpillar: 5 Lessons in OSS Design for a New Generation

OSS tools have always been built by engineers for engineers. Engineers who love to show off their brilliant minds via layers of depth and complexity. But the new generation of users has no patience for this. Nor do their team-leaders. This article explores what we can learn from OSS/BSS user interfaces (UI) that are more analogous to children's books than thousand-page technical manuals. . Lesson 1:…

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17/07/2025 No Comments

Using Proactive Simulation to keep Black Swans out of your network

Telcos pour millions into incident and problem management every year. However, these budgets only kick in after damage is done. Black-swan failures (events or event combinations that have never been seen before) still bypass every safeguard to bring networks down on a regular basis. What if we could learn from industries like aviation and pharmaceutical research to prevent massive outages before they start? Why AIOps Alone…

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16/07/2025 No Comments

96% of Telco Reality Remains Hidden: Melting the Iceberg of Ignorance in 7 Steps

The Iceberg of Ignorance, (shown in the diagram below) is a widely revered model of imperfect communication between the coalface and the boardroom in large organisations. However, in telecommunications, it bears a striking resemblance to our own OSS/BSS information collection frameworks, revealing a design flaw that impacts situational awareness. And the only way to melt this iceberg is by combining OSS, BSS and multi-domain data analytics…

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08/07/2025 No Comments

OSS implementations are never truly unique: Until you look closer

There are two prevailing schools of thought when it comes to OSS transformation: Some believe that choosing an off-the-shelf OSS platform means the deployment will follow a predictable path. After all, the software is proven, the vendor provides reference architectures, they've implemented their solution numerous times before and the manuals promise standard processes Others are convinced that every OSS transformation is entirely bespoke and demands a…

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01/07/2025 No Comments