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
“Sometimes designing is very tempting; sometimes not designing is the answer. Often silence is required instead of shouting.” Karres en Brands. It’s said that when presenting a lecture, the softly spoken have more chance of reaching an audience than the classical loud extrovert. The theory goes that if a voice is barely audible, the listener […]
“The design not only determines uses, it’s also determined by users.” Karres en Brands. Designing an OSS, or updating the design of an existing one, can be challenging for the reason that user experience is so subjective. You think your design is practical, intuitive, elegant and simple, but others may have a vastly different opinion. […]
Success leaves footprints… and so does failure. This statement is probably true in any field but especially so in OSS. One of the reasons I follow the OSS industry so closely is because I’m always on the lookout for clues. Clues that track both sets of footprints to understand why. An organisation that consistently gets […]
The first step of the Design Thinking methodology is emphathising (aka getting to know your customers). For some OSS vendors, they overlook this step assuming that they know what the customers want. Similarly for an internal project, the project team will act as the proxy on behalf of a large group of OSS users without […]
“You’re the example that can create light. Don’t try to talk people into the light. Be the light.” James Altucher. One of the things I love about OSS is that there are so many opportunities for improvement. Tools, techniques and models are all jumping forward in leaps and bounds but there is still so much […]
“All the technological change in the telecoms industry is pointing towards a more final and ultimate change, the death of the old “telco” carrier model we have known for the past few decades. We have known it is coming but the last vestiges will be swept away in 2017. All telcos will finally abandon “telco” […]
“I first came across the phrase “strong convictions, weakly held” through Marc Andreessen, but a bit of Googling showed me it was originally coined by Paul Saffo, then Director of the Palo Alto Institute for the Future. According to this post he advised his people to think this way for three reasons: •It is the […]
“Chris Bradley: You had these contests as the smoker between your current self that loved that next cigarette and your future self that didn’t want to live with the consequences of many years of smoking and knew that once you were actually out of that vicious cycle of smoking you would actually be happier. Angus […]
For those of us in the technology consulting game, we think we’re pretty clever at predicting the next big technology trend. But with the proliferation of information over the Internet, it’s not that difficult to see potentially beneficial technologies coming over the horizon. We can all see network virtualisation, Internet-connected sensor networks, artificial intelligence, etc […]
Have you noticed how the curves we’re dealing with in the service provider industry are either falling off a cliff (eg voice revenues) or going to the sky (eg theoretical exponential growth like IoE)? Here in the OSS industry, we’re stuck in the middle of these two trend curves too. Falling revenues mean reduced appetite […]
A funny thing happened today. I was looking for a reference to Marc Andreessen’s original, “software is eating the world,” quote and came across an article on TechCrunch that expressed many of the same thoughts I was going to write about. However, it doesn’t specifically cover the service provider and OSS industries so I’ll push […]
The first step of simplification (exiting legacy), be it systems, processes, products, is to know who/what is still using the old thing. Are the users internal (eg admins), external (eg customers) or are the transactions M2M (machine-to-machine)? If M2M, which machines and what are the transactions? This information becomes important for change management (eg transition […]
Blogs from the last two days have covered the dilemma of dynamic operating procedures and why the standard operating procedures of the past are perhaps too idealistic a concept. Despite this, I still try to build repeatability into the various aspects of OSS delivery – initial installation, documentation, demonstrations, training, testing (and regression testing), etc. […]
Standard Operating Procedures (SOP) have been pivotal in codifying and standardising the use cases of service providers for many years. The theory goes that if you can standardise a process, then you can produce repeatably high quality and streamline it in a cycle of continual improvement. The repeatability objective is one* of two primary recollections […]
In two recent posts, we’ve discussed the changing world order of OSS with NFV as a catalyst, and highlighted the challenges posed by maintaining legacy product offerings (the pyramid of OSS pain). These two paradigms (and others such as the touchpoint explosion) are dragging traditional service providers closer to a significant crossroad. Network virtualisation will […]
“operators that seek to implement NFV without preparing their OSS to support it are unlikely to be successful in capturing the new revenue-generating and cost-saving opportunities. OSS should not be an afterthought; it will continue to be central to the operational efficiency and agility of the service provider.” James Crawshaw in “Next-Gen OSS for Hybrid […]
“If I hear something where I want to put a gun in my mouth, it’s that boring, I smell money. You wanna open a restaurant? You wanna open a fashion brand? You wanna start a jewelry line? You wanna produce movies? You better have a steady income, because you’re not going to make a lot […]
The diagram below is a crass over-simplification of where the source of OSS pain (ie complexity) tends to originate from. If an organisation has complexity in the upper-most layer (ie products), then this is bound to flow downstream, amplifying along the way and culminating in increased complexity at support systems like OSS/BSS. If there are […]
One of the things that I’ve noticed when organisations are looking to select a new OSS is that there is a tendency to focus on the functionality. That’s one way and it can be a successful way of identifying the requirements that you need to benchmark against. I’ve also helped organisations with their vendor selection […]
“Now if at the start of the 20th century you had seen what the auto [industry] was going to do to this country, the impact it would have on the lives of then your children and grandchildren and so on. It just, it transformed the American landscape. But of those 2000 companies, three basically survive. And […]
