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, we’re so eager to have an opinion that we skip the step of working to understand.” Seth Godin. I’m currently reading “Power Listening – Mastering the Most Critical Business Skill of All” by Bernard Ferrari. In it, the author speaks of applying the Pareto Principle to listening. In other words, spending 80% of the […]
“Ultimatums rarely work because we react to the emotion instead of responding intelligently. On the other hand, giving your partner… a choice between two outcomes is a generous act, a form of truth-telling that helps both of you.” Seth Godin. One of the many things expected of a consultant is to add new insights into […]
“Our brains, our bodies, our teams, and our organizational systems are not set up to tear things down and create things at the same time. Each requires different ways of thinking and doing that are contrary to the way work happens and how people behave within these systems.” Christine Chopyak in her book, “Picture Your […]
“Google has a plan. Eventually it wants to get into your brain. “When you think about something and don’t really know much about it, you will automatically get information,” Google CEO Larry Page said in Steven Levy’s book, “In the Plex: How Google Thinks, Works and Shapes Our Lives.” “Eventually you’ll have an implant, where […]
“The machine does not isolate man from the great problems of nature but plunges him more deeply into them.” Antoine de Saint-Exupery. Many are wondering what the M2M acronym means for their OSS. M2M, or Machine to Machine, is sometimes touted as one possible saviour for CSPs that are losing revenues from their traditional cash cows […]
“Innovation accelerates and compounds. Each point in front of you is bigger than anything that ever happened.” Marc Andreessen. Regular readers / subscribers of this blog have noticed that SDN / NFV (Software Defined Networking and Network Function Virtualisation) has been a regular topic of conversation because it has the potential to revolutionise not just […]
“Heights by great men reached and kept were not obtained by sudden flight but, while their companions slept, they were toiling upward in the night.” Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. 110 years ago today, the Wright Brothers made the first manned flight, a well known story. Not quite so well known is the story of Samuel Langley, […]
“The aim of marketing is to know and understand the customer so well the product or service fits him and sells itself.” Peter Drucker. In yesterday’s blog we discussed the trend of carrier’s focussing on Customer Experience Management, specifically the results of a Comarch study on mobility carriers. There are so many aspects of CEM […]
“When a match has equal partners then I fear not.” Aeschylus. The major OSS of the nineties and noughties can be categorised as centralised, structured (ie built on relational databases and modelling connection-oriented services) and not-quite-realtime. I envisage the next generation will be distributed, unstructured (ie virtualised and with rapid shifts in data sources) and […]
“We are not cisterns made for hoarding, we are channels made for sharing.” Billy Graham. Have you ever stopped to wonder why most CSP’s OSS are so complex? Put simply, they are almost all hoarders. They collect services, device types, management systems, data, interfaces, etc. But how often do they ever discard one? Even when […]
“Those parts of the system that you can hit with a hammer are called hardware; those program instructions that you can only curse at are called software.” Anonymous. Virtualisation of the network (read SDN, NFV, etc) is a game changer for OSS. To follow the anonymous quote above, most current OSS are great at managing […]
“Inditex (the owner of the Zara fashion brand) has weathered the global economic downturn better than rivals like H&M as its “fast fashion” model has allowed it to be more responsive to changing consumer demand, while its focus on the latest trends has made it less vulnerable to the rise of discounters like Primark.” Thomson […]
“It is often easier to ask for forgiveness than to ask for permission.” Grace Hopper. There are many barriers to delivering an OSS, often built up from the rules of the organisations involved. Sometimes the rules make sense. Other times, rules (and the people responsible for enforcing these rules) just prevent progress. The best implementers […]
“When you rent a car with unlimited mileage and a full tank of gas, how far are you willing to go? You’re only limited by desire and time. The web feels that way to me. You can share as many secrets, ask as many questions, write as many blog posts as you can dream up. […]
“IT as a service is a game changer. Because you now have components of the IT department existing in the cloud, you free your in-house IT staff to shift from a maintenance mode to an innovation mode. As such, your IT department can focus on achieving business goals, creating innovative solutions, and driving sales rather […]
“I think doing variations on a classical theme is a dangerous thing to do.” Tori Amos. Many organisations select a COTS (Commercial off-the-shelf) OSS tool and immediately start thinking about customisations to make it do exactly what they want. That’s one way… but not necessarily the best long-term solution. Customisations are intoxicating for both CSPs […]
“Inertia is the resistance of any physical object to any change in its motion (including a change in direction).” Wikipedia. According to classical physics, Force equals Mass x Acceleration (F = ma). In other words, the greater the mass, the more force must be applied to reach a given acceleration (ie to effect a change). […]
“A revolution is a struggle to the death between the future and the past.” Fidel Castro. In yesterday’s blog, we discussed the air-traffic controller analogy for incremental change to your OSS via the use of projects. Today we talk of transformational change. Transformation has appeared in the Telco vernacular as a guiding vision of a […]
“The only way to make sense out of change is to plunge into it, move with it, and join the dance.” Alan Watts. A colleague and friend suggested the following as a topic to write about – “…describing OSS projects would be the constant ongoing change to the business environment supported and technology base enabling […]
“The measure of intelligence is the ability to change.” Albert Einstein. The OTT-T (Over The Top Threat) is ringing “destructive innovation” alarm bells in the ears of most global telcos. The OTT (Over The Top) play threatens to take the cream off the top, relegating CSPs to commoditised bandwidth providers whilst remaining capital intensive (it’s […]
