Passionate About OSS Blog | Passionate About OSS and BSS

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

If OSS is my hammer, am I only seeing nails?

OSS is a powerful multi-purpose tool, much like a hammer. If OSS is my only tool, do I see all problems as nails that I have to drive home with my OSS? The downside of this is that it then needs to be designed, built, integrated, tested, released, supported, upgraded, data curated and maintained. The Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) for a given problem extends far…

14/11/2017 No Comments

OSS User Experiences at 3.5 inches

"The far-reaching impact of the technology revolution of 2007 with the launch of the Apple iPhone is not to be underestimated. Across every industry, Apple has had a profound influence through the psychological effect of how consumers expect technology to interact with them. People now expect good design as part of their visual communication and interactivity with information. In obsessing over simple, intuitive design, Apple sets…

13/11/2017 No Comments

OSS death in The Matrix

"84 percent of employees are "matrixed" to some extent, meaning they serve on multiple teams" Gallup Report: "State of the American Workplace." Like me, you've probably worked on some highly functional OSS teams as well as some dysfunctional ones. Perhaps you've even worked with teams that have had elements of both. Today I reflect on what have been the ingredients of the highly functional teams I've…

10/11/2017 No Comments

Big circle. Little circle. Crossing the red line

Data quality is the bane of many a telco. If the data quality is rubbish then the OSS tools effectively become rubbish too. Feedback loops are one of the most underutilised tools in a data fix arsenal. However, few people realise that there are two levels of feedback loops. There's what I refer to as big circle and little circle feedback loops. 1. The little loop…

09/11/2017 2 Comments

An uncommon list of OSS books

Since reading the first book on this list, I've become a very avid and wide-ranging reader. The seeds sown by the book list below have immensely helped enrich the content you see here on the PAOSS blog and other PAOSS content. These are the books that have most inspired me or influenced my thinking. Sometimes in a small way. Sometimes as core, fundamental beliefs. Even though…

07/11/2017 No Comments

The OSS cosmetic surgery analogy

I love the fact that we're constantly seeking incremental improvements for our OSS. However, cumulative OSS changes can be a double-edged sword, just as they can be in the cosmetic surgery industry. In both cases, these well intentioned changes can distort as readily as they can improve. Photo-collage courtesy of DailyMail.co.uk. I've seen OSS go from being open, intuitive, adaptable and flexible tools to being so…

06/11/2017 No Comments

The alchemy of OSS

"Alchemy is the ancient practice of trying to turn lead into gold... alchemy was an art based partly upon experimentation and partly upon magic." Benjamin Radford here on Live Science. The definition of alchemy is, "part science, part art," according to Geoff Leong. To William Whewell, "In general, art has preceded science. Men have executed great, and curious, and beautiful works before they had a scientific…

03/11/2017 No Comments

The madness of most OSS training

When you've just implemented a new OSS, what does the training look like? A 2-3 week classroom course series? A train-the-trainer series, which then trickles down to the workforce? If this is what your OSS training looks like (or even closely resembles), then this is madness. Unfortunately, this is the model that I've seen most predominantly in the wild. Many OSS build contracts / RFPs even…

02/11/2017 2 Comments

This is NEVER going to happen

Have you noticed all the recent headlines about the big, iconic brands in our industry struggling to make targets, cutting headcounts, etc.? This covers vendors and service providers alike. As a complete generalisation: Vendors are going backwards Traditional CSPs are going backwards Profit decline means projects and investments in OSS can only be trending downwards too We know it's a burning platform. We know that the…

01/11/2017 2 Comments

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