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
On Friday, we published a post entitled, “Think for a moment…” which posed the question of whether we might be better-served looking back at our most important existing features and streamlining them rather than inventing new features to solve that have little impact. Over the weekend, a promotional email landed in my inbox from Nightingale […]
“Many of the most important new companies, including Google, Facebook, Amazon, Netflix, Snapchat, Uber, Airbnb and more are winning not by giving good-enough solutions…, but rather by delivering a superior experience….” Ben Thompson, stratechery.com Think for a moment about the millions of developer hours that have gone into creating today’s OSS tools. Think also for […]
“There are some jobs that are only done by accredited professionals. And then there are most jobs, jobs that some people do for fun, now and then, perhaps in front of the bathroom mirror. It’s difficult to find your footing when you’re a logo designer, a comedian or a project manager. Because these are gigs […]
““Am I being an asshole?” In other words, am I pointing out problems or am I finding solutions?” Ramit Sethi. One of the things I’ve noticed working on large and small OSS teams is that people who excel at finding solutions thrive in both. The ones who thrive on only identifying problems seemingly only function […]
Like most readers, I’m sure your OSS/BSS suite consists of many components. What if you were to look at each of those components as assets? In a share portfolio, you analyse your stocks to see which assets are truly worth keeping and which should be divested. We don’t tend to take such a long-term analytical […]
Well, this is the time of year when people make big predictions for the coming year. But let me start by saying the headline is something of a misnomer. I’m not clever enough to have any predictions for 2019 for a couple of reasons: There are far too many clever people working across the myriad […]
My favourite OSS saying – “Just because you can, doesn’t mean you should.” OSS are amazing things. They’re designed to gather, process and compile all sorts of information from all sorts of sources. I like to claim that OSS/BSS are the puppet masters of any significant network operator because they assist in every corner of […]
This is the fourth, and final part (I think) in the series on killing the OSS RFI/RFP process, a process that suppliers and customers alike find to be inefficient. The concept is based on an initiative currently being investigated by TM Forum. The previous three posts focused on the importance of trusted partnerships and the […]
As the title suggests, this is the third in a series of articles spawned by TM Forum’s initiative to investigate better procurement practices than using RFI / RFP processes. There’s no doubt the RFI / RFP / contract model can be costly and time-consuming. To be honest, I feel the RFI / RFP process can […]
Yesterday’s post discussed an initiative that TM Forum is currently investigating – trying to identify an alternate OSS procurement process to the traditional RFI/RFP/contract approach. It spoke about trusting partnerships being the (possibly) mythological key to killing off the RFP. Have you noticed how much fear there is going into any OSS procurement event? Fear […]
TM Forum is currently investigating ways to procure OSS without resorting to the current RFI / RFP approach. It has published the following survey results. . As it shows, the RFI / RFP isn’t fit for purpose for suppliers and customers alike. It’s not just the RFI/RFP process. We could extend this further and include […]
“We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills…” John F Kennedy. Let’s face it. The business of running a telco is complex. […]
I recently watched the film Bohemian Rhapsody about Freddy Mercury and the band Queen. The title of this blog refers to the sounds made by the band at the start of their song, “We Will Rock You.” There was a scene in the movie showing the origins of Thump Thump Clap, with the band adding […]
The diagram below comes from an actual client’s functionality usage profile. The x-axis shows the functionality / use-cases. The y-axis shows the number of uses (it could equally represent usefulness or value). Each big-impact demand (ie individual bars on the left-side of the graph) warrants separate investigation. The bars on the right side (ie the […]
“If we start to focus on ourselves, instead of focusing on our customers, that will be the beginning of the end … We have to try and delay that day for as long as possible.” Jeff Bezos. Jeff Bezos recently predicted that Amazon is likely to fail and/or go bankrupt at some point in time, […]
Yesterday’s post described the ways in which Telkomsel has strategically changed their value-chain to attract revenues with greater premiums than the traditional model of a telco. They’ve used a new digital core and an API framework to help facilitate their business model transformation. As promised yesterday, we’ll take a slightly closer look at the culture […]
The following two slides were presented by Monty Hong of Indonesia’s Telkomsel at Digital Transformation Asia 2018 last week. They provide a fascinating insight into the changing landscape of comms revenues that providers are grappling with globally and the associated systems decisions that Telkomsel has made. The first shows the drastic declines in revenues from […]
Don’t worry. The title of this post isn’t a typo, but I’ll get to that shortly. I’ve just had an interesting day 2 at TM Forum’s Digital Transformation Asia (https://dta.tmforum.org and #tmfdigitalasia ). The quality of presentations was again quite high with further thought-provoking ideas!! My favorite session for the day was a panel discussion […]
“You are so much more likely to put effort into something when you know whether it will pay off and what the gains will be. Not knowing how things will turn out undermines your motivation and makes you delay taking action.” Dr Theo Tsaousides in his book, Brainblocks. Have you seen the reality TV show, […]
“This is the logic that led Facebook inexorably to the ‘algorithmic feed’, which is really just tech jargon for saying that instead of this random (i.e. ‘time-based’) sample of what’s been posted, the platform tries to work out which people you would most like to see things from, and what kinds of things you would […]
