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
“Smart people are a dime a dozen. What matters is the ability to think different… to think out of the box.” Walter Isaacson. I love the “out of the box” terminology that some OSS sales people use, implying that their toolsets are fully functional straight after installation, analogous to a spreadsheet or word processing application. […]
“OpenFlow facilitates the use of “bare metal switches” and eliminates traditional vendor lock-in, giving you freedom of choice in networking like you have on other areas of your IT infrastructure such as compute and storage. SDN controllers also expose APIs northbound, which allow you to deploy a wide range of off-the-shelf and custom-built network applications […]
“With the multivendor CSP environment of today, it’s a blame game if there is something going on with the network. Just imagine throwing a lot more vendors and solutions into the mix. Unlike what we have today, an NFV proposed solution can have the VNF from one vendor and hardware from another. On top of […]
“Conflation occurs when the identities of two or more individuals, concepts, or places, sharing some characteristics of one another, seem to be a single identity — the differences appear to become lost. In logic, it is the practice of treating two distinct concepts as if they were one, which produces errors or misunderstandings as a […]
“In a hierarchy, every employee tends to rise to his level of incompetence.” Laurence J. Peter. In yesterday’s blog, we discussed the hierarchy of communication by management systems. It reminded me of a story from a project I worked on many years ago in a developing country. Communication at this organisation was firmly rooted in […]
“….I thought about the problem of communication of vision and strategy a lot, but I didn’t realise how the functional, hierarchical structure we’d borrowed from the military made communication in large organisations possible. Thinking a lot more about it since, I think the military model – the foundation of the industrial, functional, hierarchical organisation structure […]
“….once you start a company transformation, it’s like a stampede. If you try to lead from the front, you get trampled; if you try to lead from the back, you have no impact. Best to lead from the side by carefully nudging and turning the stampede to avoid everyone going over the cliff.” Robert D. […]
“You and I are streaming data engines.” Jeff Hawkins. You’ll have noticed that I often write about using sandpit environments to trial and refine different OSS configurations. They tend to be really helpful as a change management facilitation mechanism. One of the things you might be wondering is exactly what can you do in a […]
“It is bad enough for a Project Manager when a project encounters a problem – but often that is just the start of distressing conversations with project stakeholders. The key to surviving this mess is recognizing the types of conversations that loom ahead and then avoiding the destructive deliberations while consciously giving preference to worthwhile […]
“The ceramics teacher announced on opening day that he was dividing the class into two groups. All those on the left side of the studio, he said, would be graded solely on the quantity of work they produced, all those on the right solely on its quality. His procedure was simple: on the final day […]
“[AIG’s] Science Team intentionally refrains from using the words “data” or “analytics,” as the team’s capabilities stretch far beyond these two disciplines: behavioral economists, psychologists, engineers, and change management experts work hand-in-hand with data scientists, mathematicians, and statisticians. And for good reason: this multidisciplinary approach is essential to go beyond merely generating new insights from […]
“Central to the work of a project manager is balancing competing demands. The term “triple constraint” is a well-known phrase in project management that refers to the competing demands of scope, time, and cost. The manner in which these three demands are balanced affects quality. If one of these factors is affected, at least one […]
“Managed services are one of the areas where CSPs still hold sway because they are able to provide the diversity of voice, date, video, collaboration, etc and geographical coverage that the niche players can’t. As such, this is a very important revenue source to CSPs where their old cash-cows (eg voice, ISDN, etc) are drying […]
“To be successful you have to be lucky, or a little mad, or very talented, or find yourself in a rapid growth field.” Edward de Bono. Regular readers will have seen my regular references to valuable tripods in the OSS world. They are the few who are able to make valuable connections across the following three domains: […]
“One of the most important skills I have found in leaders and candidates is what is often called “learning agility.” Learning Agility, a term coined by psychologists, simply describes your ability to rapidly learn new things.” Josh Bersin, here. Fig 1: Oxford Economics – SAP 2014 Talent Research Do you think the stat in the […]
“The latest innovation with far-reaching implications for system performance is something called “software in silicon.” The concept is exactly as it sounds—putting software right into the chip for better, even faster performance.” John Soat on Forbes.com. As anyone who has worked with an OSS that has a large database can attest, OSS performance can be […]
“The bathtub curve is widely used in reliability engineering. It describes a particular form of the hazard function which comprises three parts: – The first part is a decreasing failure rate, known as early failures. – The second part is a constant failure rate, known as random failures. – The third part is an increasing […]
“For companies like VM Ware and Microsoft no-one predicted that one of their biggest threats would come from an online book retailer, yet Amazon Web Services has upended the entire software industry. The challenges for VM Ware today or Apple nearly two decades ago are being repeated in many other industries as competitors appear from […]
“I like your comparison between DCIM (Data Centre Infrastructure Management) and OSS. Do you see ITSM tools as a 3rd market or do you combine this with DCIM? I believe that traditional OSS will get challenged by ITSM as the telco service portfolio at least for enterprise customers will be more and more dominated by […]
“A value fabric is a mesh of interwoven, cooperating organizations and individuals collectively called parties. The value fabric shows the interaction among collaborating parties.” Back in the first week of August 2014, we covered a series of blogs that discussed how OSS can provide supply chain differentiation and competitive advantages. Following this series, Evan Linwood […]
