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
Another set of quotes from Peter Thiel below (actually a notes essay from Peter Thiel’s CS183: Startup – Class 4 lecture): “For a company to own its market, it must have some combination of brand, scale cost advantages, network effects, or proprietary technology“ “Brand is a tricky concept for investors to understand and identify in […]
“Show me your bookcase, the ideas that you’ve collected one by one over the years, the changes you’ve made in the way you see the world. Not your browser history, but the books you were willing to buy and hold and read and store and share. Every bookshelf tells a story. You can’t build one […]
“One of the messages at the keynote included the fact that successful busineses now have a ratio of 4:1 in the marketing and sales. This means that to maximize company growth and sales, successful companies engage about four marketing specialists to one sales person. The traditional role of the Business Development Manager or Sales Manager is […]
“Many drops make a bucket, many buckets make a pond, many ponds make a lake, and many lakes make an ocean.” Percy Ross. One of the big OSS challenges for vendors and customers alike is version management. Let’s say Customer X installs version 1.5.3 of Vendor Y’s exciting new resource management software. This software is […]
“Changing IBM is like trying to change Sweden, and it would require diplomatic and bureaucratic work.” Edward Tufte. Interesting analogy from Edward Tufte. Give or take, IBM consists of around 400,000 employees globally (FWIW. Sweden has a population of around 9.5 million people). That’s a lot of people to persuade towards a future mode of […]
“All the scientist creates in a fact is the language in which he enunciates it. If he predicts a fact, he will employ this language, and for all those who can speak and understand it, his prediction is free from ambiguity..” Henri Poincaré. As an OSS consultant, I succeed or fail partly on my ability […]
“The challenge is that complexity is beguiling. Clever tricks and hacks can add to a company’s story and the benefit vs complexity trade off for each one can be well worth it. The problem comes over time when new tricks are added to the old ones to keep the story fresh. The complexity builds up […]
“If it’s small and reversible then it’s an experiment. If not, it’s a commitment.” Author unknown but revered. With our traditional, monolithic OSS there don’t tend to be many changes that are small and reversible unless you are controlling the code and its development. We always seem to do things on a grand scale! We […]
“What I’m suggesting is that we define services in a series of hierarchical modeling steps, with each step based on an intent model that offers a from-the-consumer-side abstraction of the service/feature being defined. For network services and features, we could assume the model had a standard structure, which defined FUNCTIONAL-PROPERTIES for the model, and INTERFACES […]
“I generally look at Google as a vast machine learning engine that’s been stuffed with data for a decade and a half. Everything that Google does is about reach for that underlying engine – reach to get data in and reach to surface it out. The legacy web search is just one expression of that, […]
“Each of us guards a gate of change that can only be opened from the inside. We cannot open the gate of another, either by argument or emotional appeal.” Marilyn Ferguson. lt’s an exciting time for spatially-based OSS. The tools that underpin them such as GIS and CAD have moved off the desktop and onto […]
“They (OSS) CAN allow a CSP to be more nimble. They CAN allow a CSP to deliver business insights to customers in real-time. They CAN add significant value to a CSP’s customers. But for any number of reasons, the OSS that most telcos implement AREN’T nimble, insightful or small-business enablers.” In yesterday’s blog on “Peak […]
When it comes to the industry of CSP (Communication Service Provision), success has always followed the organisations that enabled small business (and residential, corporate, government, etc too for that matter) to harness the power of the network effect. The invention of telephony, followed shortly thereafter by telephone networks, enabled telcos to ride the network effect […]
“There is no accountability for results in the business. We are never able to follow up or measure the proper return on projects. Investments are open to so many different factors – it’s too difficult to measure and wouldn’t be credible so is felt to be a waste of time. For cutting edge/new tech projects […]
I’m delighted to announce the arrival of PAOSS’s latest publication, an eBook entitled, “OSS Masterclasses – Insights from Thought-Leaders in Operational Support Systems (OSS).” You can grab it via the link above or by clicking on the image below-right. SYNOPSIS: In creating content here on PassionateAboutOSS.com, I spend a great deal of time writing about […]
“The CFO’s understanding of the balance sheet and what drives value, together with his or her growing influence in strategy setting and technology decisions, makes the CFO an ideal business partner and agent of change. CFOs that have this 360 degree view of technology enablement and processes will be uniquely placed to help the whole […]
“An awful lot of successful technology companies ended up being in a slightly different market than they started out in. Microsoft started with programming tools, but came out with an operating system. Oracle started doing contracts for the CIA. AOL started out as an online video gaming network.” Marc Andreessen. There’s a reason tech companies […]
“I’m sure I learned a great deal at University, and I can probably even recall an equation or two, but I will never forget Professor Collins’ 3 Principles of Engineering: 1. F = ma (The take-away is this: you can’t ignore physics) 2. You can’t push on a rope (You can’t ignore the reality of […]
“In the long history of humankind (and animal kind, too) those who learned to collaborate and improvise most effectively have prevailed.” Charles Darwin. An interesting thing happened when looking up the quote for this blog. The quote I was going to use was never actually spoken/written by Charles Darwin, even though it is perhaps the quote […]
“Braess’s paradox is a proposed explanation for why a seeming improvement to a road network can impede traffic through it. It was exposed in 1968 by mathematician Dietrich Braess who noticed that adding a road to a congested road traffic network could increase overall journey time, and has been used to explain incidences of improved […]
