Passionate About OSS Blog | Passionate About OSS and BSS

Analytics and OSS seasonality

Seasonality is an important factor for network and service assurance. It's also known as time-of-day/week/month/year specific activity. For example, we often monitor network health through the analysis of performance metrics (eg CPU utilisation) and set up thresholds to alert us if those metrics go above (or below) certain levels. The most basic threshold is a fixed one (eg if a CPU goes above 95% utilisation, then…

08/12/2017 No Comments

10 ways to #GetOutOfTheBuilding

Eric Ries' "The Lean Startup," has a short chapter entitled, "Get out of the Building." It basically describes getting away from your screen - away from reading market research, white papers, your business plan, your code, etc - and out into customer-land. Out of your comfort zone and into a world of primary research that extends beyond talking to your uncle (see video below for that reference!). This…

07/12/2017 No Comments

Are your OSS better today than they were 5 years ago?

Are your OSS better today than they were 5 years ago? (or 10, 15, 20 years depending on how long you've been in the industry) Your immediate reaction to this question is probably going to be, "Yes!" After all, you and your peers have put so much effort into your OSS in the last 5 years. They have to be better right? On the basis of…

06/12/2017 No Comments

TM Forum Live! Asia started today

Gee time has a habit of getting away from me. TM Forum Live! Asia started today in Singapore. AI has been the big topic of discussion on Day 1. Give me a shout-out if you're there!

05/12/2017 No Comments

Watching customers under an omnichannel strobe light

Omnichannel will remain full of holes until we figure out a way of tracking user journeys rather than trying to prescribe (design, document, maintain) process flows. As a customer jumps between the various channels, they move between systems. In doing so, we tend to lose the ability to watch customer's journey as a single continuous flow. It's like trying to watch customer behaviour under a strobe…

05/12/2017 No Comments

The unfair OSS advantage

My wife and I attended a Christmas party over the weekend and on the trip home we discussed customer service. In particular we were discussing the customer service training she'd had, as well as the culture of customer service reinforcement she'd experienced via leaders and peers in her industry. She doesn't work in ICT or OSS (obviously?). In our industry, we talk the customer experience talk…

04/12/2017 No Comments

Do you want dirty or clean automation?

Earlier in the week, we spoke about the differences between dirty and clean consulting, as posed by Dr Richard Claydon, and how it impacted the use of consultants on OSS projects. The same clean / dirty construct applies to automation projects / tools such as RPA (Robotic Process Automation). Clean Automation = simply building robotic automations (ie fixed algorithms) that manage existing process designs Dirty Automation…

01/12/2017 No Comments

What in OSS does nobody agree with you on?

Peter Thiel (co-founder of PayPal, Founders Fund and many other snippets in an impressive highlights reel) asks prospective entrepreneurs to tell him something they believe is true that nobody agrees with them about. Today I'm asking you the same question and would love to hear your answers: What do you believe to be true in OSS that nobody else seems to agree with you on? The…

30/11/2017 No Comments

5 principles for your OSS Innovation Lab

"Corporate innovation is far more dependent on external collaboration and customer insight than having a ‘lab’." Andy Howard in a fabulous LinkedIn post. Like so many other industries, OSS is ripe for disruption through innovation. Andy Howard's post provides a number of sobering statistics for any large OSS vendors thinking of embarking on an Innovation Lab journey as a way of triggering innovation. Andy quotes the…

29/11/2017 No Comments

Bill Gates’ two rules of OSS technology (plus one)

"The first rule of any technology used in a business is that automation applied to an efficient operation will magnify the efficiency. The second is that automation applied to an inefficient operation will magnify the inefficiency." Bill Gates. The pervading OSS business case paradigm is to seek cost-out by introducing automation that reduces head-count - Do more with less. But it seems that's the antithesis of…

28/11/2017 No Comments

Do you want dirty or clean OSS consulting?

"The original management consultant was Frederick Taylor, who prided himself in having discovered the “one best way” which would be delivered by “first-class men”. These assumptions, made in 1911, are still dominant today. Best practice is today’s “one best way” and recruiters, HR and hiring managers spend months and months searching for today’s “first-class men”. I call this type of consulting clean because the assumptions allow…

27/11/2017 2 Comments

The biggest moonshot facing OSS today

"Moonshot thinking is about making something 10x better. This forces you to throw away the existing assumptions and create something bold and new. Reality will eat into your 10x. At the end of the process it may only be 2x, but that’s still amazing." Brian Jansen's Book Summary: "Bold: How To Go Big, Create Wealth, and Impact the World," by Peter Diamandis & Steven Kotler. I…

24/11/2017 No Comments

OSS expendables

When looking at a telco org chart, where does the highest staff turnover tend to occur? Contact centres? Network Operations? The fact that these two groups tend to have the highest turnover indicates that their employers see them as expendable resources. They'll never come out and say it directly, but actions speak louder than words. If these resources were valued more highly, more effort would be…

23/11/2017 2 Comments

Avoiding the OSS honey trap

Regardless of whose estimates you read, OSS is a multi billion industry. However, based on the relatively infrequent signing of new vendor deals, it's safe to say that only a very small percentage of those billions are ever "in play." In other words, OSS tend to be very sticky, in part because they're so difficult to forklift out and replace. Some vendors play his situation extremely…

22/11/2017 No Comments

Are we measuring OSS at the wrong end?

I have a really simple philosophical question to pose of you today - Are we measuring our OSS at the wrong end? It seems that a vast majority of our OSS measurement is at the input end of a process rather than at the output. Just a few examples: Financial predictions in a business cases vs Return on Invested Capital (ROIC) of that project Implementation costs vs lifetime…

21/11/2017 No Comments

Netcracker goes live at Slovak Telekom

Netcracker's Converged Fixed and Mobile Revenue Management Solution Goes Live at Slovak Telekom. Netcracker Technology announced that Slovak Telekom, the largest Slovak communications service provider, has gone live with Netcracker's converged Revenue Management solution for its residential and VSE/SoHo customers. Netcracker's offering enables Slovak Telekom to manage all billing and rating processes for both fixed and mobile customers through a single, converged, end-to-end system. As a…

20/11/2017 No Comments

6 principles of OSS UI design

"When we talk about building capabilities by design, there are a set of four core capabilities that you should keep in mind: Designed for self-sufficiency: Enable an environment where the business user is capable of acquiring, blending, presenting, and visualizing their data discoveries. IT needs to move away from being command and control to being an information broker in a new kind of business-IT partnership that…

20/11/2017 No Comments

NTT East Japan adopts Cisco NFV

NTT East Japan Adopts Cisco NFV Portfolio To Help Small and Medium Enterprises With ICT Cloud Computing. Cisco Systems G.K. announced that Nippon Telegraph and Telephone East Corporation has adopted a full-stack, ETSI-compliant NFV solution validated and supported by Cisco for its new Maruraku Office service. This will enable the centralized creation, management and operation of Information and Communications Technology (ICT) environments for small and medium…

19/11/2017 No Comments

Guns don’t kill OSS

Guns don't kill people, people do. Similarly, Technology doesn't kill OSS projects, people do... Actually people with technology do. The following shows the escalation of global CAPEX allocated by CSPs over the last thirty years (in current currency).. apart from a few brief years around the Global Financial Crisis (GFC). The CAPEX uplift also represents the increase in complexity in the networks and solutions used by…

17/11/2017 No Comments

Building an OSS piggybank with scoreboard pressure

"The gameplan tells what you want to happen, but the scoreboard tells what is happening." John C Maxwell Over the years, I've found it interesting that most of the organisations I've consulted to have significant hurdles for a new OSS to jump through to get funded (the gameplan), but rarely spend much time on the results (the scoreboard)... apart from the burndown of capital during the…

16/11/2017 No Comments

Been done before, been done before

"What percentage of the work you do each day is work where the process (the 'right answer') is known? Jobs where you replicate a process instead of inventing one... The place where we can create the most value is when we do a job where exploration and a new solution is what's needed. Not rote, but exploration. Which means we're doing something that's not been done…

15/11/2017 No Comments

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