Cloudification threatens OSS and BSS

“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 […]

ITSM, DCIM and OSS

“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 […]

Value chain

“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 […]

Pieces of the provisioning puzzle

“The art of simplicity is a puzzle of complexity.” Douglas Horton. Consolidated service orchestration requires you to solve the puzzle of complexity and deliver a wonderfully simple, repeatable engine for your operations team. It looks simple and it sounds simple, but the following list provides just a handful of the pre-requisite tasks you’ll need to […]

Internet of Things is exploding

“The internet already connects everyone and it’s about to connect everything. The ubiquity of always-on connectivity, the declining price and increasing versatility of sensors, and the benefits of remote information and control is prompting a new generation of devices ranging from doorknobs to thermostats to refridgerators to lightbulbs. From the largest technology and manufacturing companies to […]

International mergers

“The world’s telecommunications market with its national fiefdoms, loose market deregulation, over-bearing government regulation and occasional fierce competition lends itself to M&A as a means of growing, and sometimes sustaining revenues, by accessing new markets. Whilst telcos still have cash they are better positioned to buy in foreign markets as their own markets may see […]

Branding your Lexus OSS

“It’s one thing to be a ahead of your time. It’s another to change the future.” Lexus. Do telcos need differentiated prestige brands, in much the same way as Lexus is to Toyota? Do they need to differentiate their bit and byte businesses from solution integration and again from apps/content, etc? Telcos tend to be […]

OSS Skunk-works

“Executive consultant at specialist software development consultancy ThoughtWorks Leslie Barry says the skunk works division becomes a safe place for experimentation. “You do that to attract a different culture that wants to try new things, get stuff done and get it out there faster,” Barry says. “It is about attracting smart, engaged people and giving […]

OSS Supply chain – Shift No. 4

“Shift No. 4: From Single-Company Product Design to Collaborative, Concurrent Product, Process and Supply-Chain Design. OLD QUESTION: How should or company design products to minimise product cost (our cost of materials, production and distribution)? NEW QUESTION: How should collaborators design the product, process and supply chain to minimise costs?” Laura Ross Kopczak and M. Eric […]

OSS Supply chain – Shift No. 2

“Shift No. 2: From Physical Efficiency to Market Mediation. OLD QUESTION: How do we minimise the costs our company incurs in production and distribution of our products? NEW QUESTION: How do we minimise the costs of matching supply with demand while continuing to reduce the costs of production and distribution?” Laura Ross Kopczak and M. […]

OSS Supply-chain Management

“Supplying product to meet demand goes well beyond the question – Did we ship what the customer wanted today? It includes more strategic questions such as – How well do we work with our partners? Are we first to market with our new products? Do we embrace product variety or do we limit it because […]

What can your CFO do with an OSS?

“The CFO and his or her finance staff must be attuned to the drivers of the business, and must be able to work closely with operations management as well as with executive management to chart the financial and strategic impacts of prospective growth strategies.” CFO Research Services. As we often discuss, an OSS is no […]

Siphoning Value

“Is your company focused on creating value — or on siphoning it off from others? Capturing value from other stakeholders by manipulating the competitive market process to the company’s advantage exposes a company to reputational or legal risks. It also can undermine corporate values. Value extraction is typically easier than developing a competitive advantage through […]

Backtracking

“Social TV app Zeebox (recently rebranded as Beamly) thought it was doing the right thing by moving from a tabbed interface to a navigation drawer, but the results were catastrophic — customer engagement dropped by half! Zeebox scrambled to issue an update that restored the tabbed UI. A second attempt proved equally disastrous. What started […]

The Lego analogy

“Its supply chains were long and expensive – at one stage with 11,000 contractors Lego had more suppliers than Boeing used to build its aircraft! And its product development had become increasingly complex, with many product ranges involving such a wide range of choice – for example the Pirate figures had no less than 10 […]

Automated design

“…with big data techniques we can start to find out where the clusters of [revenue generating businesses] and where the clusters of bad coverage are so you can be far more selective of where you rollout to.” Kevin Noonan. In yesterday’s blog, we discussed the likelihood of more OSS vendor suites containing large-scale network design […]

The first law of holes

“It is a good thing to follow the first law of holes; if you are in one, stop digging.” Denis Healey. Unfortunately it’s far too easy to find yourself in a hole on an OSS project. I have to admit that I’ve ended up in a few OSS holes myself. Even sadder, I have to […]

OSS – the stuff of nightmares?

“For the CEO of a Telco the development of major OSS/BSS capability can be the stuff of nightmares. It was these large IT systems that I most feared would be the bottleneck in rolling out services on the NBN.” Mike Quigley , in a presentation to TelSoc. Mike was the founding CEO of NBN Co, […]

Is loss aversion alive in OSS?

“Turns out that most of us don’t like losing. In fact, it’s what the academics call loss aversion. We feel the pain of loss more acutely than we feel the pleasure of gain. In other words, we may like to win, but we hate to lose.” Carl Richards here on NYTimes. If you’ve ever worked […]

The demise of OSS

“Doesn’t this [NFV] pose a problem for organizations whose communications skill sets are all tied up in maintaining OSS? The two technologies are not compatible; NFV is designed to replace traditional OSS, not provide a comfortable transition path.” Scott M. Fulton, III on Fierce Enterprise Communications. I’d like to throw this over to you dear […]