Blown away by one innovation. Now to extend on it

Our most recent two posts, from yesterday and Friday, have talked about one stunningly simple idea that helps to overcome one of OSS’ biggest challenges – data quality. Those posts have stimulated quite a bit of dialogue and it seems there is some consensus about the cleverness of the idea.

I don’t know if the idea will change the OSS landscape (hopefully), or just continue to be a strong selling point for CROSS Network Intelligence, but it has prompted me to think a little longer about innovating around OSS’ biggest challenges.

Our standard approach of just adding more coats of process around our problems, or building up layers of incremental improvements isn’t going to solve them any time soon (as indicated in our OSS Call for Innovation). So how?

Firstly, we have to be able to articulate the problems! If we know what they are, perhaps we can then take inspiration from the CROSS innovation to spur us into new ways of thinking?

Our biggest problem is complexity. That has infiltrated almost every aspect of our OSS. There are so many posts about identifying and resolving complexity here on PAOSS that we might skip over that one in this post.

I decided to go back to a very old post that used the Toyota 5-whys approach to identify the real cause of the problems we face in OSS [I probably should update that analysis because I have a whole bunch of additional ideas now, as I’m sure you do too… suggested improvements welcomed BTW].

What do you notice about the root-causes in that 5-whys analysis? Most of the biggest causes aren’t related to system design at all (although there are plenty of problems to fix in that space too!). CROSS has tackled the data quality root-cause, but almost all of the others are human-centric factors – change controls, availability of skilled resources, requirement / objective mis-matches, stakeholder management, etc. Yet, we always seem to see OSS as a technical problem.

How do you fix those people challenges? Ken Segal puts it this way, “When process is king, ideas will never be. It takes only common sense to recognize that the more layers you add to a process, the more watered down the final work will become.” Easier said than done, but a worthy objective!

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