Passionate About OSS Blog | Passionate About OSS and BSS

The military communication model

"....I thought about the problem of communication of vision and strategy a lot, but I didn’t realise how the functional, hierarchical structure we’d borrowed from the military made communication in large organisations possible. Thinking a lot more about it since, I think the military model – the foundation of the industrial, functional, hierarchical organisation structure – is a communication-driven model… First, I led the development of…

22/10/2014 No Comments

The stampede analogy

"....once you start a company transformation, it's like a stampede. If you try to lead from the front, you get trampled; if you try to lead from the back, you have no impact. Best to lead from the side by carefully nudging and turning the stampede to avoid everyone going over the cliff." Robert D. Austin, Richard L. Nolan, Shannon O'Donnell in their book, "Harder Than…

21/10/2014 No Comments

Pre-cognitive analytics

"There are two ways to look at analytics in an Operations environment: • POST Cognitive • PRE Cognitive Post-cognitive is focusing your service management efforts on looking at events that occurred in a history after an outage. Post-cognitive is akin to driving down the road while looking out of the back window." Dougie Stevenson on Moogsoft.com. There are two concepts relating to service assurance in Dougie's article…

20/10/2014 No Comments

Ericsson acquires Sentilla

Ericsson acquires Sentilla to enhance cloud management and analytics capabilities. Ericsson announced that it has acquired Redwood City, CA-based Sentilla Corp., a provider of IT infrastructure intelligence software. The deal enhances Ericsson’s ability to help service providers support IT organizations that are struggling to overcome new network complexities introduced by mobility and the cloud. Sentilla develops software for optimal performance, real-time workload management and intelligent deployment…

18/10/2014 No Comments

Helix factors, cable sag factors and more

"In fiber optics, the cable is a light pipe or waveguide, into which you inject light. If a finger presses on the pipe, it disrupts that light within the waveguide." Jefferson Han. And if a finger pressing on the fibre can disrupt the light signal, imagine what a backhoe can do to an optical fibre cable! As a humourous aside, you may like to read Fred…

17/10/2014 1 Comment

Time to build a shorter menu?

"If IT Services departments were restaurants, they would be the most expensive, a la carte kind with long waiting lists. "Yes madam, just tell us your requirements and our food consultant will propose several different meal solutions. You can order anything you like and we will be serving it up next year!"" Jake Holloway, in this interesting article. Today's story is about a very long menu.…

16/10/2014 No Comments

Real-time sandpits

"You and I are streaming data engines." Jeff Hawkins. You'll have noticed that I often write about using sandpit environments to trial and refine different OSS configurations. They tend to be really helpful as a change management facilitation mechanism. One of the things you might be wondering is exactly what can you do in a sandpit? How does the data get into it to play with?…

15/10/2014 No Comments

Who are your most productive customers?

"...the top 15% of today’s residential subscribers in the US are said to account for about 95% of carrier profits! Thus, many service providers are looking to Next Generation Network (NGN) services as a means to attract and/or retain the most lucrative customers." Joseph C. Crimi in this white paper from Telcordia.* Do you know which 15% of customers account for 95% of your profits? What…

14/10/2014 No Comments

Data visualisation 5 – GIS

"Spatial analysis is how we understand our world—mapping where things are, how they relate, what it all means, and what actions to take. From computational analysis of geographic patterns to finding optimum routes, site selection, and advanced predictive modeling, spatial analysis is at the very heart of geographic information system (GIS) technology.." Esri. Geographic Information Systems (GIS) are a invaluable platform for OSS developers to visualise…

13/10/2014 No Comments

Next Generation OSS/BSS to Reach $40.9B Globally by 2019

Next Generation OSS/BSS to Reach $40.9B Globally by 2019 with a CAGR of 33.6% - Mind Commerce. The next generation Operational Support Systems (OSS) and Billing Support Systems (BSS) market will reach $40.9 B USD globally by 2019 with a CAGR of 33.6%, while at the same time legacy OSS/BSS is expected to contract to $20.1 B USD globally with a CAGR of -5.8%, according to…

13/10/2014 2 Comments

OSS persuasion

"Whether you are engaging a client on a solution proposal or simply kicking off your project exploration phase, clients are today deeply interested in ROI [Return on Investment]." Jason Charvat, here on TechRepublic. OSS tend to be evaluated by technical stakeholders in an organisation. They may be strong influencers, but they're not often approvers. OSS projects tend to be of sufficient size to only be approved…

10/10/2014 No Comments

Boku acquires rival mopay

Boku acquires rival mopay to lead carrier billing-based mobile payment biz. Boku announced the acquisition of its rival mopay. Germany-based mopay is one of the largest carrier billing companies in the world. The acquisition makes Boku the largest standalone provider of carrier billing-based mobile payment services in the world. The companies will merge operations and operate under the Boku brand. Financial terms were not revealed. Leading…

09/10/2014 No Comments

Jeopardy management

"It is bad enough for a Project Manager when a project encounters a problem - but often that is just the start of distressing conversations with project stakeholders. The key to surviving this mess is recognizing the types of conversations that loom ahead and then avoiding the destructive deliberations while consciously giving preference to worthwhile discussions. One valuable tool that can help in the most serious…

09/10/2014 No Comments

Documentation, before or after? (What if scenarios)

"The ceramics teacher announced on opening day that he was dividing the class into two groups. All those on the left side of the studio, he said, would be graded solely on the quantity of work they produced, all those on the right solely on its quality. His procedure was simple: on the final day of class he would bring in his bathroom scales and weigh…

08/10/2014 2 Comments

Multi-disciplinary insights

"[AIG's] Science Team intentionally refrains from using the words “data” or “analytics,” as the team’s capabilities stretch far beyond these two disciplines: behavioral economists, psychologists, engineers, and change management experts work hand-in-hand with data scientists, mathematicians, and statisticians. And for good reason: this multidisciplinary approach is essential to go beyond merely generating new insights from data but also to systematically enhance individual human judgment in real…

07/10/2014 No Comments

Premature optimisation

"Premature optimization is the root of all evil." (1) Donald Knuth. I find it interesting that "automation" has become such a common buzz-word in the vernacular of virtualised networking... and OSS for that matter. It seems that it has become one of the primary expectations from any network management project. I can understand that automation should be an objective because of the potential efficiency gains that it…

06/10/2014 No Comments

The Trillion-Dollar Treasure Chest

"Integrated operators are sitting on a veritable gold mine. Monetizing passive assets could unlock billions of dollars—enough to wipe out their [traditional telcos's] entire debt." Liu, Garg and Bhagat in this article on ATKearney.com. I really recommend taking a close look at the link above. Being an OSS-nerd, this report takes me to a different perspective on ways that traditional telcos can ease the CAPEX pressures…

03/10/2014 2 Comments

Augmented Outside Plant – Part 2

In an earlier blog entry, I wrote about using Augmented Reality (AR) to equip field staff with views of physical assets (eg underground, data centre, etc) (and OSS data of course). Well, I've just found out that such a product exists from a company called Augview (perhaps there are others I'm unaware of too?). The following video provides a demonstration of Augview:

02/10/2014 No Comments

Ericsson acquires Ambient

Ericsson completes acquisition of smart grid communications provider, Ambient. Ericsson announced it has completed the acquisition of Ambient Corporation, a US-based award-winning provider of smart grid communications technology for utilities. Ambient's innovative platform enables utilities to deploy and integrate multiple smart grid applications and technologies, in parallel on a single communications infrastructure. The acquisition increases Ericsson's ability to help utilities maximize their investments in smart grids.…

02/10/2014 No Comments

The Triple Constraint of OSS

"Central to the work of a project manager is balancing competing demands. The term “triple constraint” is a well-known phrase in project management that refers to the competing demands of scope, time, and cost. The manner in which these three demands are balanced affects quality. If one of these factors is affected, at least one other factor will also be affected. For example, if the scope…

02/10/2014 2 Comments

Clarity Telecom Selects NetCracker

Clarity Telecom Selects NetCracker Revenue Management for Long-Term Managed Services Agreement. NetCracker Technology announced that Clarity Telecom has agreed to a multi-year, hosted managed services arrangement through which it will leverage NetCracker’s order entry, provisioning, billing and revenue management solutions. The use of these solutions will enable Clarity to support its consumer triple-play service offerings as the operator rapidly expands with aggressive merger and acquisition activity.…

01/10/2014 No Comments

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