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…
Read More »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…
Read More »Here's a slightly mind-blowing fact for you - A child born when iPhone was announced will be 10 years old in 2 months (a piece of trivia courtesy of Ben Evans). That's nearly 10 years of digitally native workers coming into the telco workforce and 10 years of not-so-digitally native workers exiting it. We marvelled that there was a generation that had joined the workforce that…
Read More »When I last looked, Passionate about OSS had been seen from over 180 countries. Many of those countries have probably witnessed the pop-up shop phenomenon. I suspect many have not (yet). For those who aren't familiar with the concept, it sees organisations taking up short-term residence to deliver customer experience, most often in retail environments (more info on pop-up stores here on wikipedia) As a test…
Read More »It Took Sheryl Sandberg exactly 2 sentences to give the best career advice you'll hear today. I want you to ponder the following question for a moment, because it's one of the most important questions you'll ever answer... The question was posed to Sheryl Sandberg: "What's the number one thing you look for in someone who can scale with a company?" Sandberg's reply: "Someone who takes…
Read More »Yesterday's blog provided a contrast between a NOC and NASA's Mission Control. It indicated that Mission Control is focussed on a single payload whilst NOCs are managing thousands / millions of services simultaneously. From a customer experience perspective, we need to build OSS / BSS suites that are able to track every journey from end-to-end rather than the more common batch / silo approach. But this…
Read More »On face-value, you'd think that NASA's Mission Control (MC) would have quite a lot in common with the typical service provider's Network Operations Centre (NOC), apart from the fact that NASA probably IS largely run by rocket scientists. Both MC and NOCs exist to operate and coordinate a multitude of different, complex systems as well as providing event / crisis management mechanisms. However, there is one distinct difference and…
Read More »There's a myriad of important metrics used across the world of telco, ranging from technical to marketing, to financial to executive. As discussed yesterday, OSS / BSS has an influence on many of these key metrics. Not only that, but the volumes of data collected by most OSS / BSS give scope to slice and dice like a Japanese master-chef. You can look at the big…
Read More »I was doing some work on Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) within telco environments the other day and it made me realise that OSS can have a direct impact on every one of them. Here are a few responsibilities of OSS / BSS: TTM or MTTP - Time to Market or Mean Time to Product - If your marketing team has a new product or engineering has…
Read More »"When facing a reputation problem, most organizations simply rebrand. This is the safe route: stick with what you know but tell the public you are innovating, hoping they won’t notice you’re doing nothing of the sort. But Avaya CEO Kevin Kennedy saw the deeper problem behind Avaya’s NPS score and knew radical change was necessary... Even though the transformation Avaya underwent was risky, Kennedy saw an…
Read More »"Warren Buffett has said that ‘leaving the question of price aside, the best business to own is one that over an extended period can employ large amounts of incremental capital at very high rates of return’ and ‘a truly great business must have an enduring “moat” that protects excellent returns on invested capital’. We think we’ve found one. Hansen Technologies (ASX: HSN) is an off-the-radar small-cap…
Read More »"The proposed AT&T/Time Warner deal combines two powerhouses. AT&T is the nation’s largest pay TV provider, the second-largest wireless provider, and the third-largest home Internet provider. Time Warner owns a dizzying array of media properties, including HBO, CNN, Warner Brothers, DC Comics, TBS, TNT, the Cartoon Network and broadcast rights to many live sporting events. But it does not own Time Warner Cable, a separate entity…
Read More »Here's a quick strategy idea for you to extrapolate upon. Whether you represent a service provider, OSS vendor, integrator, consultant, etc, what are you most afraid your competitors might do? Chances are that your answers will represent a quantum leap in some form. Does your answer to the question help to articulate what your ideal quantum leap might be? Are you currently working towards that, or…
Read More »"Some simple principles: - Software can change faster than hardware, which means that in changing markets, bet on software. - It's tempting to treat the user interface as a piece of fashion, some bling, a sort of jewelry. It's not. It's the way your user controls the tool you build. Change it when it stops working, not when you're bored with it. Every time you change…
Read More »Do you know what the word ossify means? If not, can you guess? No, it's not another of my made-up words to describe OSS in an obscure way. For those of you who didn't already know that it's a real word and what it means, wait for it... it means to cease developing; to stagnate. It's more commonly used in medical circles - to turn into…
Read More »We've recently talked about the two service provider business model extremes - OTT / DSP (Over the Top or DSP) versus REIT / TaaU (Telco as a Utility) are affecting OSS. The fast-twitch OSS that services the OTT / DSP model is bringing about some fascinating changes in the way service providers procure "assets." They're no longer buying equipment (or software) outright, but buying as a…
Read More »Yesterday's blog discussed innovation at the speed of data being even faster than innovation at the speed of software. But not all aspects of OSS need to evolve at the sames speeds. In the Olympics, sprinters need fast-twitch muscles and training to hone for speed, whilst marathon runners need slow-twitch muscles and appropriate training for endurance. The same appears to be true in OSS, with the…
Read More »Marc Andreessen famously wrote an essay entitled, "Why software is eating the world," in the WSJ in 2011, which has proven to be an accurate insight. I thought he was also responsible for the term, "innovation at the speed of software," but a search only reveals PAOSS and a few other references, so perhaps I've mangled a quote somewhere along the line. I like it nonetheless…
Read More »Does this clip from Big Bang Theory remind you of any of your OSS colleagues? It does remind me of many colleagues and customers from over the years, but it also unfortunately reminds me of myself sometimes. I've been guilty of prescribing the aircraft-grade aluminium when the cheap Swedish media centre would've done the job. I have to try hard not to slip into this mode.…
Read More »"Once upon a time I used to think that entrepreneurs had to be smart enough to develop a niche strategy. A nice smart strategy which will keep them hidden from the big ugly and powerful incumbents and other startups. A strategy to extract sneaky revenue. I learned how wrong I was the hard way... Turns out niche strategies limit the number of doors we can knock…
Read More »Windstream Automates Provisioning of Wavelength Services Across Nationwide, Multi-Vendor Network Using Ciena Blue Planet. Windstream is deploying Ciena’s Blue Planet orchestration software to automate the delivery of managed wavelength services across the company’s multi-vendor optical network. By leveraging the open orchestration capabilities of Blue Planet, Windstream is able to utilize its optical network as a programmable resource and accelerate the delivery of managed 1 GbE, 10…
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