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
There’s the “complete” way of doing Agile with all of the “best practices” and then there’s the approach where you just take the “best parts,” the parts that suit your needs. There are some great aspects to using Agile on OSS projects including the break-up of effort (epics / stories), the systematic prioritisation of work […]
“It’s quite common, especially in enterprise technology, for something to propose a new way to solve an existing problem. It can’t be used to solve the problem in the old way, so ‘it doesn’t work’, and proposes a new way, and so ‘no-one will want that’. This is how generational shifts work – first you […]
“It is unquestionably true that many of the most important technology advances looked like toys at first – the web, mobile phones, PCs, aircraft, cars and even hot and cold running water at one stage looked like faddish toys for the rich or the young. Even video games, which literally are toys, are also largely […]
As we all know, an heirloom is an item that is passed from generation to generation. In the world of OSS, there are a lot of heirloom tools out in the wild. Their long-since-departed* sponsors / builders have ensured their legacy survives with the tools they have built. In the traditional context (eg jewelry, furniture, […]
“Mike Flint was Warren Buffett’s personal airplane pilot for 10 years. (Flint has also flown four US Presidents, so I think we can safely say he is good at his job.) According to Flint, he was talking about his career priorities with Buffett when his boss asked the pilot to go through a 3-step exercise. […]
“I should say… that in the real world exponential curves don’t continue for ever. We get S-curves which closely mimic exponential curves in the beginning, but then tail off after a while often as new technologies hit physical limits which prevent further progress. What seems to happen in practice is that some new technology emerges […]
I’m a die-hard sports fan, as a player and watcher, so I find it interesting how parallels are drawn between work and sport – in particular, that “you practice as you play.” Alternatively, it’s implied that if you practice sloppy, you play sloppy. But if we look at a professional athlete that dedicates 40 hours […]
My grandfather achieved many great things in his lifetime and I’m really proud to come from his lineage. I have many great memories of him and one perplexing one. When I was accepted into Engineering at Uni, he proudly presented me with his trusty slide-rule and stated that I’d be needing it in my course. […]
“Most customers buy the basic and learn to love the features, but the whole customer experience is based on trying to sell the features.” Roger Gibson. This statement appears oh-so-true in the OSS sales pitches that I’ve observed. In many cases the customer really only needs the basic, but when every vendor is selling the […]
“To become a business asset, the role of data within an organization must move from being departmentally siloed to being centrally managed. Breaking down the siloes is not necessarily a technical challenge, but an organizational one. It requires a data strategy, the correct level of ownership and corporate governance. Data-as-a-business-asset means a single definition of […]
“Applying the Second Law of Thermodynamics to understanding reality, Boyd infers that individuals or organizations that don’t communicate with the outside world by getting new information about the environment or by creating new mental models act like a “closed system.” And just as a closed system in nature will have increasing entropy, or disorder, so […]
I was due to speak at TM Forum Live today but wasn’t able to make it across to France this year. However, the talk will still continue on, so if you’re in Nice please drop in to listen to Amrit Singh and Crispin Blackall talk about how Infosys and Telstra are using microservices to deliver […]
TM Forum Live is currently bringing together some of the leading thinkers in the world of OSS at a gathering in France. Whilst I can’t be there, a colleague is representing PAOSS and relayed this message: Best quote in my opinion was Shahar Steiff of PCCW – “Open source isn’t like free candy – it’s […]
Last week we compared OSS to Theseus’ ship, how it was constantly being rebuilt mid-voyage, then posing the question whether it was still actually the same ship. OSS transformation is increasingly becoming a Theseus’ ship model. In the past, we may’ve had the chance to do big-bang cutovers, where we simply migrated users from one […]
“When you evaluate the market, you’re looking to understand where people are today. You empathize. Then you move into storytelling. You tell the story of how you can make their lives better. That’s the “after” state. All marketing ever does is articulate that shift. You have to have the best product, and you’ve got to […]
The concept of digital transformation can be massive… or it can stem from something much smaller. In digital transformation, there’s a mantra of simplify then transform. That makes perfect sense, in alignment with, “The chess-board analogy,” but often overlooked. But there’s another simplification perspective to take. Let’s take the 6 blind men and the elephant […]
In an earlier post entitled, “Looking Forward to Jeopardy and Fall-outs,” I described a method for projecting forward to the likelihood of a design falling into a failure state and using that data to drive continual improvement. Not only that, but to drive the future of self-service telco designs, as I’ll describe today! The diagram […]
The handshake analogy compares: The number of people at a gathering to the number of handshakes required to greet them all; with The number of systems in an environment to the number of interfaces required to inter-link them (and associated complexity)). 1 person (system) = 0 handshakes (ie nobody else to shake hands with => 0 […]
“Some pilots are proving quite interesting in enhancing Network Operations. Especially when AI / ML is used in the form of Natural language processing – NOC operators are talking to a ML system in natural language and asking questions in context to an alarm about deep topics ( BGP, 4G eUTRAN, etc). Do more with […]
When we find that orders have gone into (are about to go into) a jeopardy state or a fall-out state, the experts are brought in and tend to work backwards to identify the problem and resolve it. But what if our OSS were able to predict the likelihood of future failure and present that information […]
