"When experts are wrong, it's often because they're experts on an earlier version of the world." Paul Graham. OSS experts are often wrong. Not only because of the "earlier version of the world" paradigm mentioned above, but also the "parallel worlds" paradigm that's not explicitly mentioned. That is, they may be experts on one organisation's OSS (possibly from spending years working on it), but have…
Read More »OSS wear many hats and help many different functions within an organisation. One function that OSS assists might be surprising to some people - the CFO / Accounting function. The traditional service provider business model tends to be CAPEX-heavy, with significant investment required on physical infrastructure. Since assets need to be depreciated and life-cycle managed, Accountants have an interest in the infrastructure that our OSS manage…
Read More »I don't know about you, but I find this industry of ours has a remarkable ability to keep us humble. Barely a day goes by when I don't have to slap my forehead and say, "uhhh.... of course!" (or perhaps, "D'oh!!") I had one such instance yesterday. I couldn't figure out why a client's telemetry / performance-management suite needed an inventory ingestion interface. Can you think…
Read More »The following is a set of user stories I've provided to TM Forum to help with their current Autonomous Networking initiative. They're just an initial discussion point for others to riff off. We'd love to get your comments, additions and recommended refinements too. As a Head of Network Operations, I want to Automatically maintain the health of my network (within expected tolerances if necessary) So that…
Read More »At Passionate About OSS, we're lucky enough to count the utilities market as an important part of our client base. This probably puts us in a very small percentage of OSS exponents that work across OSS for telco and utilities. Utilities have a number of interesting and unique nuances compared with other OSS markets. Starting at the top, the network is core business for a telco,…
Read More »You've all probably seen this scene from the Tom Hanks movie, Apollo 13 right? But you're probably wondering what it has to do with OSS? Well, this scene came to mind when I was preparing a list of user stories required to facilitate Autonomous Networking. More specifically, to the use-case where we want the Autonomous Network to quickly recover (as best it can) from unplanned catastrophic…
Read More »I must've written dozens of posts about us needing to collectively invest a lot more effort into UI / UX. I've written quite a few over the last few months especially. This one in particular springs to mind. As an industry, we typically don't do user experience journeys (UX) or user interfaces (UI) very well at all yet. I know thousands of OSS experts, but only…
Read More »A slightly left-field thought dawned on me the other day and I'd like to hear your thoughts on it. We all know that almost all telemetry coming out of our networks is time-stamped. Events, syslogs, metrics, etc. That makes perfect sense because we look for time-based ripple-out effects when trying to diagnose issues. But therefore does it also make sense to geo-stamp telemetry data too? Just…
Read More »In yesterday's post, we talked about what needs to happen for a network operator to build an autonomous network. Many of the factors extended beyond the direct control of the OSS stack. We also looked at the difference between designing network autonomy for an existing OSS versus a ground-up build of an autonomous network. We mostly looked at the ground-up build yesterday (at the expense of…
Read More »....I want to make my network so observable, reliable, predictable and repeatable that I don't need anyone to operate it. That's clearly a highly ambitious goal. Probably even unachievable if we say it doesn't need anyone to run it. But I wonder whether this has to be the starting point we take on behalf of our network operator customers? If we look at most networks, OSS,…
Read More »"For those starting out in product, here's a tip: Design, Defaults*, Documentation, Details and Delivery really matter in software."Jeetu Patel here. * Note that you can interpret "Defaults" to be Out-Of-The-Box functionality offered by the product. Let's break those 5 D-words down and describe why they really matter to the OSS industry shall we? Design - The power of OSS product development tends to lie with…
Read More »In last Tuesday's post, I asked the community here on PAOSS and on TM Forum's Engage platform for ideas about how you would benchmark complexity. I also provided a reference to an old post that described the concept of a NSS (Net Simplicity Score) for our OSS/BSS. Due to the complexity of factors that contribute to a complexity score, the NSS is a “catch-all” simplicity metric. Hopefully…
Read More »It seems that OSS/BSS are always an afterthought. And always seen as a cost centre rather than a revenue generator. Now I'm biased of course, but I think that's such a narrow view. And we need everyone in our industry to spread the same gospel. I like to think of it like this... Sales teams identify the customers and revenue (let's call them THE BUY-SIDE). Network teams…
Read More »I'd love to ask you an important question... how do we benchmark OSS/BSS complexity? To measure how complex our systems are and therefore provide a signpost for simplification.A colleague has opined that the number of apps in a stack could be used a proxy. I can see where he's going with that, but I feel that it doesn't account for architectural differences such as monolith versus…
Read More »There's an old adage that "the confused mind always says no." Consider this from your own perspective. If you're in a state of confusion about something, are you likely to commit wholeheartedly or will you look to delay / procrastinate? The paradox for digital transformation is that our projects are almost always complex, but complexity breeds confusion and uncertainty. Transformation may be urgently needed, but it's…
Read More »In Monday's article, we suggested that the three technical factors that could get the big boss fired are probably only limited to: Repeated and/or catastrophic failure (of network, systems, etc) Inability to serve the market (eg offerings, capacity, etc) Inability to operate network assets profitably In that article, we looked closely at a human factor and how current trends of open-source, Agile and microservices might actually…
Read More »In Monday's article, we suggested that the three technical factors that could get the big boss fired are probably only limited to: Repeated and/or catastrophic failure (of network, systems, etc) Inability to serve the market (eg offerings, capacity, etc) Inability to operate network assets profitably In that article, we looked closely at a human factor and how current trends of open-source, Agile and microservices might actually…
Read More »In Monday's article, we suggested that the three technical factors that could get the big boss fired are probably only limited to: Repeated and/or catastrophic failure (of network, systems, etc) Inability to serve the market (eg offerings, capacity, etc) Inability to operate network assets profitably In that article, we looked closely at a human factor and how current trends of open-source, Agile and microservices might actually…
Read More »Not sure whether you have a clear answer to that question - either the thought is enticing (you want the CEO to get fired), unthinkable (you don't want the CEO fired) or somewhere in between. You'd invariably get different answers from different employees within most organisations (you can't please all of the people all of the time). Today's post also has no singular situation, so it…
Read More »I'm currently reading a book entitled, "Jony Ive. The genius behind Apple's greatest products." I'd like to share a paragraph with you from it (and probably expect a few more in coming days): "...Apple's internal culture heavily favored the engineers within the product groups. The design process was engineering driven. In the early days of Frog Design, the engineers had bent over backward to help implement…
Read More »When I first started the Passionate About OSS site / blog many years ago, I was lucky to get a handful of views per day. It's grown by many multiples since then, fortunately. The launch of The Blue Book OSS/BSS Vendor Directory generated some exciting metrics yesterday. The directory alone came within 5 pageviews of the highest count we've ever seen on PassionateAboutOSS.com (and PAOSS is…
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