OSS are all about helping the customer in some way
Dell sells directly to its customers, avoiding the markups of intermediaries. Dell once diverged from this model, selling through agents, but failed and quickly reverted. The OSS market is quite clearly different from Dell’s PC and laptop market, with vastly different customer volumes and revenue per customer. However, there are some OSS companies that have […]
Most of you would have noticed a significant structural shift in the last few years towards customer advocacy and listening to the customer far more closely, not just in OSS but across most industries. This introduces some interesting contrasts though. In any given year most OSS engineers, despite being genba staff, don’t get the opportunity […]
“Eric Raymond proposed that a computer should ‘never ask the user for any information that it can autodetect, copy, or deduce’; computer vision changes what the computer has to ask. So it’s not, really, a camera, taking photos – it’s more like an eye, that can see.” Ben Evans here. There’s a big buzzword going […]
Question for the community. Have any of you heard of (or experienced) a Telco using data out of their IVRs (Interactive Voice Response) solutions to link up with OSS data? There is a current trend to use merge social data sets to determine customer sentiment and potentially cross-reference against network health and other OSS/BSS data […]
“Global telecommunications study: navigating the road to 2020.” In the study listed above, executives at some of the world’s largest CSPs indicate that the players most likely to disrupt their industry is OTT app providers. Any thoughts on why they might be perceived to be 30x more influential than technology specialists, or 5x more influential […]
I recently read this great scenario in a customer’s requirements gathering guide and it can be related to the capturing of OSS requirements too. As a husband, I can also relate more directly to the scenario. 😉 Wife says… I sent my husband grocery shopping for: Tomato paste Shampoo Apples Extra Virgin Olive Oil Milk […]
When it comes to designing, building and configuring OSS, there is a tendency to have a functionality delivery mindset. That is, if we can get our OSS to meet each functional requirement then we tick the box and move on to the next. There is usually a long list of requirements that need to be […]
Network operators often talk about five-nines (ie 99.999% up-time on any given network device) as a measure of the reliability of their networks. However, I personally don’t believe that many of the operators’ customers would consider this as a measure of network quality. Five-nines is a metric that is widely cited from inside the walls […]
“To avoid commoditization, telcos should become the focal point of the extended value chain, focusing on digital services and taking advantage of their traditional competencies.” “Global telecommunications study: navigating the road to 2020.” The graph above tells a story about the changing share of wallet (end-to-end value chain) in the telecommunications sector. The three dials […]
“Instead of asking: do we have enough capacity? telcos should be asking: when (and where) will we run out of capacity? And what are we doing to mitigate? Instead of simply reacting to outages, telcos should have a real time view of the current risk points, failure scenarios and their impacts – with recovery plans should the […]
“Gartner’s 2016 CIO Survey revealed five key innovation practices that deliver the highest improvement in digital performance: Crowdsourcing, Different metrics, Formal innovation management and work with Startups. Nevertheless according to the same survey, CIOs also indicated that these five innovation were the least used.” Sebastian Barros here. I suspect these CIO findings are also mirrored in the OSS industry. How many […]
“Perhaps the most egregious platform failure is to simply not see the platform play at all. It is also one of the hardest for traditional firms to avoid. Firms guilty of this oversight never get past the idea that they sell products when they could be building ecosystems. Sony, Hewlett Packard (HP), and Garmin all […]
A very clever friend of mine made an interesting observation recently. He had noticed that one of his global markets, a developing region, tended to ask for a very different set of outcomes from his OSS than his customers in more developed regions. He has noticed that the developing regions are asking business level questions […]
“Nine in ten businesses (87 percent) face severe turbulence as they pursue digital transformation, according to research from Bizagi, a provider of digital process automation software. The global study of over 1,000 IT and customer experience professionals finds that businesses are rapidly embracing digital transformation, with 73 percent believing that failure to keep up will […]
Over the years I’ve seen many OSS presentations, often in the role of helping a customer make a decision on which OSS option to proceed with. There have been some good presentations and others that didn’t go so well. I’ve even seen the best-fit products dropped out before short-listing because presentations were structured so poorly […]
“Most of us are, by default, in automation mode. We are pattern-seeking animals, and there is immense comfort in the familiar…established systems help to preserve our energy and attention. Things are easier. The cognitive (and emotional) burden of trying to figure out what needs to be done, when and by whom, is minimal, Automation is […]
As you might have noticed, I’m passionate about OSS, what they can do now, what they can do in the future and how they can help organisations prosper in this highly digital era. But one of the things I notice when speaking with the vast number of people directly involved or touched by our industry […]
“More people will pay you money to help them achieve a monetary goal than will pay you to give them something pretty to look at.” Web Teacher In recent posts we’ve explored OSS user interfaces and simpler interfaces in particular. But a pretty interface is only useful if helps a prospective client achieve a monetary […]
“The utter complexity of huge, standardized software systems also explains the death of big software. Enormous whole-company projects are often beyond the capabilities of even the most experienced project and program managers – especially when there’s never 100% consensus about the need for such a draconian project in the first place. The cloud has also […]
“We’re an industry that still has overwhelming demand for what we do. We’re right at the core of this digital ecosystem; we’re in an amazing position. We enable the digital world to really happen, so without understating the issues we have – the value chain issues we have, the disruption we face – we should […]
