OSS are all about helping the customer in some way
The following two slides were presented by Monty Hong of Indonesia’s Telkomsel at Digital Transformation Asia 2018 last week. They provide a fascinating insight into the changing landscape of comms revenues that providers are grappling with globally and the associated systems decisions that Telkomsel has made. The first shows the drastic declines in revenues from […]
I’ve just had a really interesting first day at TM Forum’s Digital Transformation Asia (https://dta.tmforum.org and #tmfdigitalasia ). The quality of presentations was quite high. Some great thought-provoking ideas!! Nik Willetts kicked off his keynote with the following quote, which I’m paraphrasing, “Telcos need to start capturing value, not just creating it as they have […]
“You are so much more likely to put effort into something when you know whether it will pay off and what the gains will be. Not knowing how things will turn out undermines your motivation and makes you delay taking action.” Dr Theo Tsaousides in his book, Brainblocks. Have you seen the reality TV show, […]
I wonder if we’re reaching the point where “telecommunication services” is no longer a relevant term? By association, SLAs are also a bust. But what are they replaced by? A telecommunication service used to effectively be the allocation of a carrier’s resources for use by a specific customer. Now? Well, less so Service consumption channel […]
Here at Passionate About OSS, we’re passionate about making OSS happen. We have an extensive network of contacts. We just naturally tend to find ourselves making connections between the many experts in our network. Connecting those who are hoping to find an OSS expert with an OSS expert hoping to be found. We’ve just introduced […]
“This is the logic that led Facebook inexorably to the ‘algorithmic feed’, which is really just tech jargon for saying that instead of this random (i.e. ‘time-based’) sample of what’s been posted, the platform tries to work out which people you would most like to see things from, and what kinds of things you would […]
A number of years ago I heard about an OSS product that introduced collaborative rooms for network operators to collectively solve challenging network health events. It was in line with some of my own thinking about the use of collaboration techniques to solve cross-domain or complex events. But the concept hasn’t caught on in the […]
“While the 20th century was all about centralizing command and control to gain efficiency through vertical integration and mass standardization, 21st century automation is about decentralization – gaining efficiency through horizontal integration of partner ecosystems and mass customization, as in the context-aware cloud where personalized experience across channels is dynamically orchestrated. The operational challenge of […]
““If you asked me how to sell cybersecurity, I wouldn’t call it cybersecurity.” The raw truth of the statement hit me like a lightning bolt between the eyes. Cybersecurity might loosely describe what we do, and we tell people it’s what we’re selling, but it’s not what people buy. Safety. Assurance. Peace of mind. Confidence. […]
Let’s start with a basic question. “What does an OSS need to do?” The basic answer is, “make operations easier.” The real answer(s) is so much more nuanced than that of course. The term easier can also encapsulate other words such as faster, more accurate, more repeatable, cheaper, etc. Designing, building, operating and maintaining a […]
Image linked from GCaptain.com. As you already know, the word pivot has become common in the world of business, particularly the world of start-ups. It’s a euphemism for a significant change in strategic direction. In the context of today’s post, I love the word pivot because it implies a rapid change in direction, something that’s […]
Build it and they will come. This is not always true for OSS. Let me recount a few examples. The project team is disconnected from the users – The team that’s building the OSS in parallel to existing operations doesn’t (or isn’t able to) engage with the end users of the OSS. Once it comes […]
There’s a common belief that most jobs see people rewarded for presence rather than performance. That is, they’re encouraged to be on site from 9am to 5pm rather than being given free reign over their work schedules as long as key outcomes are met / exceeded. In OSS vendor / product selection there’s a similar […]
One of the challenges with getting a new OSS or OSS transformation project completed can be the large number of dependencies that can cause momentum gridlock. If you’re looking to deliver business value in one big-bang, which is a really common approach to delivering OSS projects, then you end up juggling many different activities and […]
“Apple became the first company to be worth a trillion dollars. They did that by spending five years single-mindedly focusing on doing profitable work. They’ve consistently pushed themselves toward high margin luxury goods and avoided just about everything else. Belying their first two decades, when they focused on breakthrough work that was difficult and perhaps […]
Over the years I’m sure you’ve seen many different OSS demonstrations. You’ve probably also seen presentations by vendors / integrators that have shown multiple different products from their suite. How integrated have they appeared to you? Have they seemed tightly integrated, as if carved from a single piece of stone? Or have they seemed loosely […]
As you already know, there are two categories of downtime – unplanned (eg failures) and planned (eg upgrades / maintenance). Planned downtime sounds a lot nicer (for operators) but the reality is that you could call both types “incidents” – they both impact (or potentially impact) the customer. We sometimes underestimate that fact. Today’s question […]
“The iPhone disrupted the handset business, but has not disrupted the cellular network operators at all, though many people were convinced that it would. For all that’s changed, the same companies still have the same business model and the same customers that they did in 2006. Online flight booking doesn’t disrupt airlines much, but it […]
The diagram below attempts to show how the entire market (whether that’s the supplier-side or the buyer-side) will absorb a given new feature. The leaders pick up the concept at T0 and then it takes another few years before the laggards implement it. Most of us in the OSS implementation world crave to be at […]
“If your partners don’t have to talk to you then you win.” Guy Lupo. Put another way, the best form of customer service is no customer service (ie your customers and/or partners are so delighted with your automated offerings that they have no reason to contact you). They don’t want to contact you anyway (generally […]
