Passionate About OSS Blog | Passionate About OSS and BSS

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…

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…

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.…

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…

17/11/2016 No Comments

Gartner Network Performance Monitoring and Diagnosis report

Thought you might find this link interesting For those interested in getting a complimentary copy of the "Gartner Network Performance Monitoring and Diagnostics" report from February 2016, you can find a sign-in page here.

16/11/2016 1 Comment

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…

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…

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…

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…

09/11/2016 4 Comments

Can you imagine how you’ll interact with your OSS in 10 years?

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…

08/11/2016 No Comments

How quickly could your OSS set up a pop-up shop?

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…

07/11/2016 2 Comments

OSS Mission Control requires horizontal feedback

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…

04/11/2016 No Comments

A proxy for OSS Mission Control

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…

03/11/2016 No Comments

How a typical NOC differs from NASA’s Mission Control

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…

02/11/2016 No Comments

Slicing and dicing like a Japanese master-chef

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…

01/11/2016 No Comments

Are there any essential metrics that your OSS is not on the hook for?

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…

31/10/2016 No Comments

The risk of doing nothing with your OSS

"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…

28/10/2016 4 Comments

The blueprint of a brilliant OSS business model

"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…

27/10/2016 No Comments

The CAPEX tri-chotomy

"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…

26/10/2016 No Comments

What are you afraid that your competitors might do?

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…

25/10/2016 No Comments

Are our OSS / BSS contributing to customer churn?

"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…

24/10/2016 No Comments

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