"A smart manager will establish a culture of gratitude. Expand the appreciative attitude to suppliers, vendors, delivery people, and of course, customers." Harvey Mackay. Over the years, I've noticed an approach that is used by some OSS solution integrators / vendors but interestingly, not by others. It's what's known as "land and expand." It's when the supplier manages to develop a small OSS foothold and then…
Read More »Telem Group Selects Centina Systems for End-to-End Network Visibility to Improve Operational Efficiencies. Centina Systems announced that Telem Group is set to deploy its NetOmnia™ suite of solutions for real-time end-to-end visibility of the network and improved troubleshooting and problem resolution. Telem Group’s selection of Centina’s NetOmnia™ Fault and Performance Management and Service Vision solutions are to support the company’s entire infrastructure for cellular, DSL, VoIP…
Read More »"Executive consultant at specialist software development consultancy ThoughtWorks Leslie Barry says the skunk works division becomes a safe place for experimentation. “You do that to attract a different culture that wants to try new things, get stuff done and get it out there faster,” Barry says. “It is about attracting smart, engaged people and giving them a space to work in. And they will almost hack…
Read More »"If big data is collected in a forest and nobody is around to mine it, are any insights found?" Ryan Jeffery. To quote David Prior, "Big Data is Rubbish." Click on the link to find out why. Check out slide 42 in particular. Whether you want to call it BIIIIG DATAAAAA or just data, OSS are great at collecting lots of the stuff. Cool! But now…
Read More »"Shift No. 6: From Mass-Market Supply to Tailored Offerings. OLD QUESTION: How should we organise our company’s operations to serve the mass market efficiently while offering customised products? NEW QUESTION: How should we organise the supply chain to serve each customer or segment uniquely and provide a tailored customer experience?" Laura Ross Kopczak and M. Eric Johnson in the "MIT Sloan Management Review." At first glance,…
Read More »"Shift No. 5: From Cost Reduction to Breakthrough Business Models. OLD QUESTION: How can we reduce our company’s production and distribution costs? NEW QUESTION: What new supply-chain and marketing approach would lead to a breakthrough in customer value?" Laura Ross Kopczak and M. Eric Johnson in the "MIT Sloan Management Review." The old and new questions mark a fundamental shift in the relevance of a modern…
Read More »"Shift No. 4: From Single-Company Product Design to Collaborative, Concurrent Product, Process and Supply-Chain Design. OLD QUESTION: How should or company design products to minimise product cost (our cost of materials, production and distribution)? NEW QUESTION: How should collaborators design the product, process and supply chain to minimise costs?" Laura Ross Kopczak and M. Eric Johnson in the "MIT Sloan Management Review." Shift No. 4 in…
Read More »SingTel Selects NetCracker and NEC to Deliver Comprehensive Service Layer Transformation for its Enterprise Business. NetCracker Technology and NEC Corporation announced that Singapore Telecommunications Ltd (SingTel) has selected them to transform the backend systems for its enterprise customers. The solution will automate and enhance SingTel’s end-to-end service fulfillment processes to enable its Group Enterprise to bring new products and services bundles to the market more swiftly.…
Read More »"Shift No. 3: From Supply Focus to Demand Focus. OLD QUESTION: How can we improve the way we supply product in order to match supply and demand better, give the demand pattern? NEW QUESTION: How can we get earlier demand information or affect the demand pattern to match supply and demand?" Laura Ross Kopczak and M. Eric Johnson in the "MIT Sloan Management Review." OSS and…
Read More »"Shift No. 2: From Physical Efficiency to Market Mediation. OLD QUESTION: How do we minimise the costs our company incurs in production and distribution of our products? NEW QUESTION: How do we minimise the costs of matching supply with demand while continuing to reduce the costs of production and distribution?" Laura Ross Kopczak and M. Eric Johnson in the "MIT Sloan Management Review." This is a…
Read More »"Shift No. 1: From Cross-Functional Integration to Cross-Enterprise too. OLD QUESTION: How do we get the various functional areas of our company to work together to supply product to our immediate customers? NEW QUESTION: How do we coordinate activities across companies as well as across internal functions to supply product to the market?" Laura Ross Kopczak and M. Eric Johnson in the "MIT Sloan Management Review."…
Read More »"Supplying product to meet demand goes well beyond the question – Did we ship what the customer wanted today? It includes more strategic questions such as – How well do we work with our partners? Are we first to market with our new products? Do we embrace product variety or do we limit it because we can’t handle it? Are our sales promotions creating chaotic demand…
Read More »"The CFO and his or her finance staff must be attuned to the drivers of the business, and must be able to work closely with operations management as well as with executive management to chart the financial and strategic impacts of prospective growth strategies." CFO Research Services. As we often discuss, an OSS is no longer just a tool for use by network operations. These tools…
Read More »CSG International Expands Relationship with Comcast. CSG Systems International, a global provider of interactive transaction-driven solutions and services, today announced that it has expanded and extended its relationship with Comcast Cable to provide residential billing services through June 30, 2019. Currently, CSG provides its end-to-end, pre-integrated customer care and billing solution to approximately two-thirds of Comcast’s existing residential customers. The expanded contract provides the framework for Comcast…
Read More »"Is your company focused on creating value — or on siphoning it off from others? Capturing value from other stakeholders by manipulating the competitive market process to the company’s advantage exposes a company to reputational or legal risks. It also can undermine corporate values. Value extraction is typically easier than developing a competitive advantage through ongoing value creation. Companies can get hooked on the practice, to…
Read More »The team at TM Forum has been kind enough to start re-publishing content from PassionateAboutOSS.com on their Inform platform. Just in case you didn't already know, TM Forum is a global trade association trusted by the world’s largest enterprises, service providers and suppliers to help them continuously transform to succeed in the digital economy.
Read More »"Social TV app Zeebox (recently rebranded as Beamly) thought it was doing the right thing by moving from a tabbed interface to a navigation drawer, but the results were catastrophic — customer engagement dropped by half! Zeebox scrambled to issue an update that restored the tabbed UI. A second attempt proved equally disastrous. What started out as an attempt to embrace a widely used design pattern…
Read More »"We were trying to empower the networking people and the CIO in an organisation to add some value to bring to marketing, but we found that getting the digital marketing team or the CMO involved early on makes the sales cycle move a lot faster. And we found that, for a lot of our customers, CMO has more budget dollars for IT than the CIO: for…
Read More »"Its supply chains were long and expensive – at one stage with 11,000 contractors Lego had more suppliers than Boeing used to build its aircraft! And its product development had become increasingly complex, with many product ranges involving such a wide range of choice – for example the Pirate figures had no less than 10 different leg designs, each with its own clothing – that it…
Read More »Ericsson acquires MetraTech to accelerate cloud and enterprise billing capabilities. Ericsson announced it has entered into an agreement to acquire US-based MetraTech Corp., a provider of metadata-based billing, commerce and settlement solutions uniquely adaptable to multiple business models and industries. The acquisition includes all 140 employees and contractors comprising a team of highly-skilled software experts. It will further build upon Ericsson's expertise in billing and expands…
Read More »"The best way to systematize your business is to first do each job yourself. Find the best or preferred way to do each task, and create a system for doing it that way that is easy to follow. Repeat this process for every function of your business until every part is systematized.." Michael Gerber. The Telco industry is built around patterns. Even bespoke services tend to…
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