Passionate About OSS Blog | Passionate About OSS and BSS

Openet selected by Tier 1 North American operator

Openet’s Digital as a Service solution selected by Tier 1 North American operator to power Digital First Sub-brand. Openet announced that it has entered a partnership with a Tier 1 North American operator to provide its Digital as a Service solution. This solution comprises integrated best of breed solutions that will combine to deliver an AI driven end to end Digital Business Platform that will be…

15/12/2017 No Comments

Group Vivendi Africa deploys Netcracker OSS

Netcracker's OSS Suite to Support GVA's Rapid Network Expansion, Market Growth and Service Diversity. Netcracker Technology announced that its OSS suite was selected and deployed to support the long-term growth strategy of Group Vivendi Africa (GVA). GVA is a newly formed affiliate of the French-based multinational conglomerate Vivendi with the goal to deploy and operate a fiber network across Africa. Netcracker's OSS will be used as…

14/12/2017 No Comments

Is micro-strangulation underway within OSS?

Yesterday's post spoke of how the accumulation of features was limiting us to small, incremental change. The diagram below re-tells that story: You've probably noticed that microservices are the big buzz in our industry. They're perceived as being the big white hope for our future. I have my reservations though. If you're at t0 in the chart above, microservices allow for rapid rollout of features, whole…

14/12/2017 2 Comments

The strangulation of OSS feature releases

The diagram below provides a time-sequence view of how tech-debt accumulation eventually strangles new OSS feature releases unless the drastic measures described are taken. At start-up (t0), the system is brand new and has no legacy to maintain, so all effort can be dedicated to delivering new features (or products) as well as testing to ensure control of quality. But over time (t0 + 10, where…

13/12/2017 6 Comments

A career without OSS

Have you ever noticed that the biographies of almost every successful person contains the chapter(s) where everything goes disastrously? It seems inevitable that there are periods in our careers where things don't go right, no matter how successful you are. Interestingly my least successful project was also one that had only a very small OSS component to it. It was one of the triggers to starting…

12/12/2017 5 Comments

Can the OSS mammoths survive extinction?

"Startups win with data. Mammoths go extinct with products." Jay Sharma. Interesting phraseology. I love the play on words with the term mammoths. There are some telcos that are mammoth in size but are threatened with extinction though changes in environment and new competitors appearing. I tend to agree with the intent of the quote, but also have some reservations. For example, products are still a…

11/12/2017 No Comments

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

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