Passionate About OSS Blog | Passionate About OSS and BSS

Is AI a digital transformation bridge or noose? (part 4 – Autonomy Hazards)

I’ve never achieved true autonomy in an end-to-end, complex telco environment. What follows is a hypothesis. I'd love to hear your thoughts and clarifications. What I have achieved are small autonomous solutions that did work nicely, until a single baseline parameter changed. Then assumptions broke, dependencies surfaced and entire solutions + datasets had to be rebuilt rather than adapted. In fact, the "extra cleverness" that I'd…

01/01/2026 No Comments

Is AI a digital transformation bridge or noose? (part 3 – Dependency Visibility)

Many (myself included), believe that recent progress in AI-based technologies should accelerate digital transformation (even if only by inspiring us to think differently about the digital systems we already have). However, in Part 1 of this series we explored a paradox. The most common uses of AI today are not loosening the grip of legacy OSS/BSS, but quietly perpetuating them for years/decades to come through new…

31/12/2025 No Comments

Is AI a digital transformation bridge or noose? (part 2 – Transformation Planning)

In Part 1 of this series, we explored an uncomfortable paradox. AI is being excitedly positioned as the key to telco transformation, yet many initiatives are quietly reinforcing the same legacy digital landscapes they would love to replace. That leads to a more fundamental question. Before choosing AI models, architectures, or tooling, must we actually decide what kind of transformation we want - Evolution or Revolution?…

30/12/2025 No Comments

Is AI a digital transformation bridge or noose? (part 1 – AI Entanglement)

Like microservices before it, AI and agentic solutions are increasingly seen as the panacea of digital transformation. In telco circles, AI is often framed as the fastest path to escape. A way to finally move beyond the clunky, legacy worlds of OSS/BSS. Piecemeal AI projects promise quick wins, modern capabilities, and a stepping stone towards grand visions like Autonomous Networks and Autonomous Operations. But when you…

29/12/2025 No Comments

Trust

We speak with buyers and sellers every week, and one word keeps repeating. Trust. It keeps appearing in buyer conversations and seller conversations alike. It's more than a word though. It's costing the telco industry millions. When trust is missing, 18-24 month buying cycles become the default. This is the Buyer - Seller Chasm that we talk about a lot. You're probably already well aware of…

23/12/2025 No Comments

How do you build experience when AI handles all the experiences?

The promise is simple: let AI handle the easy work, and humans focus on the hard work, the challenging work, the fun work. But the hard work is hard because it depends on intuition and experience that comes from years of guidance doing the easy work (the apprenticeship). So if AI handles all of the experiences the beginner stage (the apprenticeships), we don’t get “more experts”…

16/12/2025 No Comments

Are we missing something? Is AI building a house with many competing thermostats?

I’d always assumed that more feedback loops meant better control, and faster / smarter / optimal operations. But what happens when each system has its own idea of what “smart” or “optimal” even means? Are we, in fact, optimising our way into instability and inefficiency? Could hundreds of competing feedback loops be automating misalignment faster than ever before? These are just a few of the questions…

02/12/2025 4 Comments

Fighting the Telco Immune System with AI: The Moviestar Strategy

We're already seeing it. AI is slowly infiltrating telecom, one little project at a time... monitoring, automating, optimising. In AI, we have one of the most disruptive opportunities of our lifetime, but the results of telco AI projects to date still feel eerily familiar. Are most telcos using tomorrow’s tools with yesterday’s thinking? Maybe the real breakthroughs will not come from subtly refining the machine, but…

26/11/2025 No Comments

Speed Kills (the Competition): A Confusing Speedtest Image Told the Story

We know telco customers want faster speeds.But is it possible that we're focussed on the wrong type of speed?Here's a hint: the real drag isn't line-speed. . “Finally”: The Message that Triggered an Article Late last week a friend pinged me with a SpeedTest screenshot and a single word: “finally.” I was confused. At first I had no idea what he was trying to tell me.…

25/11/2025 No Comments

12 reasons why our OSS get better by wearing hi-viz vests

Ever noticed how many OSS decisions are made by people who have never set foot on site? What if your single most powerful OSS upgrade this year is a day riding shotgun with field techs in a hi-viz vest? This article digs into the quiet damage that OSS experts with a total lack of field time does to our processes, tools and data. . Introducing the…

18/11/2025 No Comments

Telco is a Circus with Thousands of Balls in the Air

Are you frustrated by the complexity of your OSS/BSS factory? With hundreds or even thousands of systems, all trying to juggle thousands of activities without dropping the ball is like organised chaos. But what if we're looking at it all wrong, both in the way we've always designed our legacy application architectures and how we're now planning to use AI in it? . So many jugglers…

11/11/2025 No Comments

Stop the Archaeological Dig: Bringing Your OSS Dinosaur Back to Life

Are you worried that your OSS/BSS stack, or parts of it, might be in desperate need of an overhaul? Many OSS experts love being archaeologists, down on their knees, carefully brushing off the dust to unearth their OSS fossil and painstakingly preserving it. But modern network operations aren't archaeological digs. We can't just make educated guesses from bone fragments and the wise insights of our best historians.…

06/11/2025 No Comments

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…

31/10/2025 No Comments

What to Build, What to Drop: A Product Roadmap Scorecard for OSS/BSS Tools that Endure (part 4)

Most OSS/BSS roadmaps today overflow with novelty and buzz. You might even hear the words Agentic AI come up (not that I have anything against it but it can be a little over-hyped at times). But this series has taken a different path. We've looked at how to build a model that looks for enduring benefits that really move the needle today (and will continue to…

21/10/2025 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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

05/09/2025 No Comments

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