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
“I’ve been involved in telecom operations for decades, and I’ve learned that there is nothing in networking as inertial as OSS/BSS. A large minority of my experts (but still a minority) think that we should scrap the whole OSS/BSS model and simply integrate operations tasks with the service models of SDN and NFV orchestration. That’s […]
The world of OSS, no matter where you are placed within its orbit, seems to be chaotic. There are always so many things to get done – updates, fixes, incidents, planning, designs, meetings, emails, etc, etc. I’d love to hear what you would do if the following situation presented itself: Every week, you get a […]
CSPs globally are trying to be innovative, and being heavily involved in tech since their earliest days, always perceive themselves to be innovative to their core (yes, bad pun). There’s no doubt that there is a lot of innovation happening in large CSPs, but I wonder how much of it is really attributable to the […]
Voice and data are no longer the services that organisations, large and small, see as making a difference. The services that do make a difference are more dynamic and diverse – digital distribution, promotion and marketing, payments and billing, business intelligence, business continuity (including security) and more – the factors that make their organisations thrive. […]
I’ve noticed the term “tech debt” entering the OSS vernacular to represent stuff that is built now as a short-term workaround before the long-term solution comes online. But what if it’s ALL tech-debt? Everything we build needs to be supported for its natural life. The more we accumulate, the more that needs supporting. Support represents […]
Over the last few days, this blog has been diving into the career steps that OSS (and tech) specialists can make in readiness for the inevitable changes in employment dynamics that machine learning and AI will bring about. You’ve heard all the stories about robots and AI taking all of our jobs. Any job that […]
Getting literate in the language of the future posed the thought that data is the language of the future and therefore it is incumbent on all OSS practitioners to ensure their literacy. It also posed that data literacy provides a stepping stone to a future where machine learning is more prevalent. This got me thinking. […]
As we all know, digitalisation of everything is decreasing barriers to entry and increasing the speed of change in almost every perceivable industry. Unfortunately, this probably also means the half-life of opportunity exploitation is also shrinking. The organisations that seem to be best at leveraging opportunities in the market are the ones that are able […]
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 […]
