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 had never experienced life without the Internet. The generation that has never experienced life without mobile Internet, apps, etc is now on the march.

The smart-phone revolution spawned by the iPhone has changed, and will continue to change, the way we interact with information. By contrast, there hasn’t really been much change in the way that we interact with our OSS has there? Sure, there are a few mobility apps that help the field workforce, sales agents, etc and we’re now using browsers as our clients (mostly) but a majority of OSS users still interact with OSS servers via networked PCs that are fitted with a keyboard and mouse. Not much friction has been removed.

The question remains about how other burgeoning technologies such as augmented reality and gesture-based computing will impact how we interact with our OSS in the coming decade. Are they also destined to only supplement the tasks of operators that have a mobile / spatial component to their tasks, like the field workforce?

Machine learning and Artificially Intelligent assistants represent the greater opportunity to change how we interact with our OSS, but only if we radically change our user interfaces to facilitate their strengths. The overcrowded nature of our current OSS don’t readily accommodate small form-factor displays or speech / gesture interactions. An OSS GUI built around a search / predictive / precognitive interaction model is the more likely stepping stone to drastically different OSS interactions in the next ten years. A far more frictionless OSS future.

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