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What is the opportunity cost of not embarking on machine-led decision support?

In earlier blogs, we've referenced this great article on SingularityHub to show how the exponentiality of technological progress tends to surprise us as change initially creeps up on us, then overwhelms us in situations like this: But what if we changed the "exponential growth surprise factor" in the diagram above to "opportunity cost?" Further to yesterday's blog about the uselessness but value of making predictions, we…

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08/12/2016 No Comments

OSS predictions are useless… but invaluable

"Planning is useless but planning is invaluable. Predictions are useless but invaluable." Scott Galloway. The world of OSS, if it's even called that anymore, is in a rapid state of change. Business models, delivery models, network topologies, IT platforms, test methodologies and more are creating impacts that are changing our industries and that's not even taking into account the innovative and disruptive OSS products that are…

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07/12/2016 No Comments

Packaging your OSS products for rapid rollout

Yesterday's blog spoke of building an ultra-cut-down version of OSS products to get them in and working quickly. That blog leads into an interesting concept being used in the Agile world, Weighted Shortest Job First (WSJF) [Hat tip to Scott for bringing this to my attention]. "WSJF is a scheduling algorithm (or if you prefer, prioritisation method) that maximises the amount of whatever it is you…

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06/12/2016 No Comments

Why don’t more OSS use the entry-level offer strategy?

The OSS market has two ends of a continuum - one end consisting of what I refer to as "the self-service customer" (ie highly repeatable) and the other being "the requirement of one customer," (ie highly customised). Naturally there are contracts that fall on the continuum between these two extremes too. The self-service end of the market has proven to be a successful niche for some…

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05/12/2016 4 Comments

NSS – The one “simple” performance indicator for your OSS

Yesterday's blog discussed the fact that many of the KPIs gathered and used by OSS / BSS could potentially conflict with other KPIs, even when used within a single organisation. It then posed a question: "Have you ever seen an organisation define a simplification metric as one of their highest-profile KPIs?" One of the biggest hurdles facing OSS projects, as described here in The triple constraint…

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02/12/2016 No Comments

OSS is awash with KPIs, many that are conflicting. What to do?

Anyone involved with OSS will know that it is a DBA (Death By Acronym) experience. We have so many acronyms to deal with, some known globally, others only with relevance to a specific organization. One of the most common acronyms is the KPI (Key Performance Indicators). What's scary is that the KPI is a catch-all phrase for a set of metrics that invariably have their own…

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01/12/2016 No Comments

Why is mass customisation so important for the future of OSS?

"McDonald's hit a peak moment of productivity by getting to a mythical scale, with a limited menu and little in they way of customization. They could deliver a burger for a fraction of what it might take a diner to do it on demand. McDonald's now challenges the idea that custom has to cost more, because they've invested in mass customization. Things that are made on…

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30/11/2016 No Comments

Where does trial and error belong in OSS?

I hold a somewhat philosophical view of where OSS (and IT in general) fits within its overall timeline. It's all pretty nascent in the grand scheme of things. Whilst communitications technology is the common thread, I've worked in many industries including construction, mining, engineering, government, utilities, emergency services, healthcare, farming and more. Most of these industries have been around for far longer than OSS. As the…

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29/11/2016 No Comments

eTOM or TAM as a product mapping tool?

Have you noticed that TM Forum's eTOM seems to be used in common vernacular when people talk about mapping and/or comparing products. eTOM and TAM are both quite closely linked (you'll notice the similarities in colour-banding between the two). However, eTOM is more of a standardized mapping of workflows, whereas TAM is more of a mapping of standardized product functionalities. Since workflows follow a journey, often through multiple…

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28/11/2016 2 Comments

If the OSS sales process is broken, does this narrative help to fix it?

Yesterday's blogged posited that the OSS sales process - of joining a customer and a vendor to form a sales contract - tends to have serious flaws. Whilst deals still get done (you can see enough of them by clicking on the "News" category here on PAOSS), I've yet to see a deal where both parties were ecstatic about the whole process, notwithstanding the excitement of…

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25/11/2016 No Comments

Is the way we pitch our OSS broken?

A couple of facts about the OSS market that you've probably already noticed - It's highly fragmented and the selling cycle tends to average 12-18 months. This means that cost of sales and cost of acquisition are a source of frustration for each side of the equation. Over the years, I've been privileged to have regularly sat on either side of the OSS buying equation. I've worked…

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24/11/2016 No Comments

Here’s a long-play OSS analytics strategy for you to try

Analytics is a term that has caught fire in IT relatively recently. In many ways, our OSS have been doing "analytics" for years, albeit not necessarily with the same tools at their disposal. If we simplify the term down to the use case of "being able to ask questions of a massive data store" then that's what OSS have been doing almost since their inception decades…

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23/11/2016 No Comments

What happens when you digitise sh!t processes?

"So, I asked myself, why? Why aren't businesses taking the opportunity to digitize and improve at the same time? The answer I suspect is because many digitizing programmes sit on a hot-bed of over-engineering. Oftentimes this means adopting"strategic" business platforms which require companies to adapt their processes to fit them rather than the other way round. Sometimes, it can mean hiring expensive contractors that don't understand…

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22/11/2016 2 Comments

How to transform your OSS. The moving house analogy

In recent times, I did some work at a tier-1 telco where an adjacent project was implementing a major changeover of an essential OSS / BSS platform. The old suite is acknowledged as having lots of legacy data, processes, etc. And when I say legacy, I mean stuff that hasn't been used for years, just clogging up the system rather than old but still useful. The…

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21/11/2016 4 Comments

I’d like to share a different angle on the OSS cost-out mantra

As you've all noticed, "cost-out" is one of the biggest justification techniques used in the OSS industry. The theory is that if you can automate activities, then you can reduce head-count from the operations team, thus reducing costs. While I'm happy to help customers build business cases around this perspective, I have a slight divergence that I share with them and am sharing with you today.…

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18/11/2016 No Comments

Samsung to buy Harman for $8 Billion

Samsung to buy Harman for $8 Billion in bold autos gambit. Samsung Electronics Co. is spending $8 billion to buy its way into a burgeoning market for automotive technology alongside Apple Inc. and Google as the smartphone business wanes. The South Korean company is making its largest-ever overseas acquisition with an offer for Harman International Industries Inc., angling to become the go-to supplier of everything from…

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17/11/2016 No Comments

Comptel wins new customer

Comptel Has Won New Customer for Digital Sales Channel FWD Comptel Corporation has won a new customer for its digital sales channel solution, FWD. Comptel’s first SaaS solution now makes it possible to purchase time-based data packages from major prepaid operator in APAC. The transaction value of the deal is based on the number of subscribers adopting the FWD solution. “Micro-pricing makes the access to information…

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12/11/2016 No Comments

Where exactly does an OSS user journey start? It might not be where you first think!

I've recently been doing quite a bit of work (and hypothesizing) on journey mapping for customers of telco services. I had been conceptualising the journeys starting from channels such as a retail outlet (eg O2A - order to activate), from an online store (eg U2C - usage to cash), from an IVR (eg T2R - trouble to resolve), etc. From there, they typically bounce around between…

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11/11/2016 No Comments

Should we put the A in STEM to delight with our OSS?

You've all heard of the STEM acronym right - Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics. They're all pretty important contributors to the OSS story. The question however is whether there's an "A" missing from STEM in the form of Art. Is it STEAM that should power OSS? Let me ask you a question - in your whole career in OSS, how many colleagues have you known to…

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10/11/2016 No Comments

Do you apply Design Thinking to your OSS change?

Design Thinking appears to be "the great differentiator" for many consulting firms at the moment (the only problem is if everyone is using it as a differentiator, then is it really a differentiator?). Having said that, the principles of Design Thinking do highlight a couple of important steps that I've found to be lacking in many OSS design / architecture deliveries. First, a Design Thinking recap…

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09/11/2016 4 Comments