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…
Read More »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…
Read More »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…
Read More »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…
Read More »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…
Read More »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…
Read More »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…
Read More »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…
Read More »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…
Read More »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…
Read More »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…
Read More »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:…
Read More »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…
Read More »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…
Read More »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…
Read More »Most carriers still rely on traditional RFP processes to select OSS/BSS vendors. These methods are seen as rigorous and comprehensive. However, they are slow, inflexible and often fail to surface the best-fit vendor. Despite consuming vast time and effort, statistically, they are only ~30% likely to find the best-fit vendor for your needs. We've continually refined our OSS procurement model over the years. It uses probabilistic…
Read More »OSS dragon-slayers, the veterans of our industry who have built the OSS of today, are being quietly laid off and struggling to find re-employment for the first time in their careers. The industry has many reasons to explain why they are no longer employable. However, as telco infrastructure shifts into the hands of long-horizon investors, there might just be an interesting twist hiding in plain sight…
Read More »Telcos have tolerated lengthy OSS/BSS rollouts as a necessary evil for years, but what if those same systems are the chains holding the telco world back. Which is the chicken and which is the egg? Is it OSS/BSS and/or the market that needs a radical reboot? Which must be rebooted first? OSS and BSS are deeply linked with telco business models. As you'll see from the…
Read More »You’ve already got your dragon slayers. Your team is filled with seasoned OSS professionals who’ve faced complex, high-stakes problems and lived to tell the tale. They’re reliable, sharp, and tested. But if you’re the King / Queen, the one responsible for building the team, then you need more than just experience. You need adaptability. Perspective. The ability to see what even your veteran dragon-slayers don't or…
Read More »Many OSS veterans, the people who built the OSS of today, are no longer being offered full-time roles. Clients often assume they have become obsolete or are simply too expensive. However, these same experts are still solving the toughest OSS problems, drawing on decades of hard-earned experience. They are just not doing it from inside your org chart. The real surprise? These highly experienced OSS dragon…
Read More »This article provides a summary of our Buyer-Seller Chasm series of articles, where we start with the guiding principle that: The buyers (carriers) desperately need better tools to transform their operations. The sellers (vendors) already have better tools, which they desperately want to sell. The problem worth solving lies in the extraordinary amount of time, resources and cost it usually takes to bring buyers and sellers…
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