OSS Transformation is all about managing change – organisationally, functionally and operationally during in-flight projects. This is the most commonly overlooked factor when planning OSS projects
Everyone wants to know who the best OSS vendor is. But since there are 500+ OSS/BSS vendors, that question usually starts an argument, rather than the transformation you want to kick-start. The better question is which vendor best fits you best – your architecture, budget, maturity, constraints and operating model. PAOSS’s Inverted Pyramid approach starts […]
Telco keeps talking about being scared of an imminent skills cliff. But perhaps the real problem is not just that experienced people are leaving. It’s that the industry has stopped feeling like the natural destination for the next generation of brilliant minds. Meanwhile, the industry’s hardest problems – automation, AI-native operations, complex transformation, data integrity, […]
The old proverb above really resonates. I love this industry. You could even say I’m Passionate About OSS. And like many of us, I’ve been a beneficiary of trees that other people planted – frameworks, knowledge, standards, examples, terminology, APIs, architectures and shared wisdom. But it feels like we’re now on the cusp of generational […]
After reading the book, How Big Things Get Done (by Bent Flyvbjerg and Dan Gardner) about why megaprojects fail, I found it fascinating that it overlapped with another recent article. Flyvbjerg and Gardner’s core argument is that successful complex projects are not won by speed of commitment, but by better odds and better sequencing, which […]
I have a really important question for you to ask yourself today. It’s a question that shapes a lot of our thinking about how I can help the OSS/BSS/telco industry. How does what I do make more money for clients? Not just what your company does. Not what your brand says on the website. Not […]
We’re releasing our latest report today. Click on the image below to download it. Why are transformation approvals (eg business case approvals, vendor selections, project transformation decisions) forced to look perfect when delivery is anything but? That is the quiet contradiction at the heart of many (most?) digital transformation programmes. We build business cases as […]
As seen in the diagram, for most of telecom history, the core business model has been simple: Build networks Sell access to those networks Recover capital (revenue) through subscription and usage revenues, and Protect margin through scale and operational efficiency But what happens if (when? after?) that model breaks? What happens if connectivity becomes so […]
If you’re leading an OSS/BSS transformation, one of the hardest parts is not knowing what needs to happen first (or second, third, etc). Not in theory. In practice. Most large transformation programmes don’t fail because of a lack of ambition. They fail because the early sequencing is off or steps are overlooked. Vendor conversations begin […]
With MWC upon us again, I thought I’d pose a question about how our industry, and the 500+ OSS/BSS vendor market within it, is currently evolving. Telcos spend billions on transformation programmes every year. They talk about massive disruption like cloud-native stacks, open architectures, AI-driven automation and next-generation digital experiences. On paper, it sounds like […]
Quants have become the rockstars of modern share trading – extracting powerful signals from oceans of data at near real-time speed. Trading firms invest billions in them and in infrastructure that will give them even the slightest timing edge. Yet while telcos drown in dashboards, the next competitive advantage may belong to the “NOC-star” – […]
One of the things I find incredibly interesting when I look at the Simplified TAM diagram below is that of each of the arrows indicating a workflow, only one has systems that aren’t really designed to manage the operational workflow. Assurance has trouble tickets Fulfilment has service orders Field operations has work orders Even billing […]
Two goldfish are dropped into a new tank. One turns to the other and asks, “Do you know how to fire the cannon on this thing?” That single gag captures the moment when what you expected collapses and the script is flipped. It has similarities with what users experience when a software transformation is forced […]
What happens when a Software Engineer, Enterprise Architect and Network Ops Engineer walk into a bar?….. . You know that head-slap moment when you realise software is more hindrance than help? I had one such experience back in circa 2005, when I watched a genuinely brilliant network ops engineer spend an entire afternoon navigating tools […]
A reader of Mastering Your OSS recently reached out to indicate that he found Chapter 7 useful for understanding OSS-related risks and mitigations. He pointed out that this section encourages readers to contact us for a more comprehensive list of risks and risk management strategies. That’s right. So here are the top-8 articles/pages on our […]
Have you ever wondered why there’s such a big deal made of the start of a marriage (there’s a whole industry built around engagements and weddings), but there’s almost no fanfare at the end? Samuel Thompson pointed this out on Greg Isenberg’s podcast. Samuel highlighted that there are lots of products designed for the start […]
Whether we like it or not, most of us judge books by their covers. Sometimes that’s visual. Sometimes it’s the title. But here’s a thing I find interesting. Having written a couple of books myself, a lot of thought goes into choosing the title to resonate with the viewing audience. And yet, sometimes a title […]
The last four articles have explored the way some telcos are using AI technologies counter-productively today – AI entanglement, transformation planning, dependency visibility and the hazards of autonomy. The final question for this article is whether telcos can or will ever earn the right to unplug their legacy OSS. In Part 4, we ended with […]
I’ve never achieved true autonomy in an end-to-end, complex telco environment. What follows is a hypothesis. I’d love to hear your thoughts and clarifications. What I have achieved are small autonomous solutions that did work nicely, until a single baseline parameter changed. Then assumptions broke, dependencies surfaced and entire solutions + datasets had to be […]
Many (myself included), believe that recent progress in AI-based technologies should accelerate digital transformation (even if only by inspiring us to think differently about the digital systems we already have). However, in Part 1 of this series we explored a paradox. The most common uses of AI today are not loosening the grip of legacy […]
In Part 1 of this series, we explored an uncomfortable paradox. AI is being excitedly positioned as the key to telco transformation, yet many initiatives are quietly reinforcing the same legacy digital landscapes they would love to replace. That leads to a more fundamental question. Before choosing AI models, architectures, or tooling, must we actually […]
