OSS are all about helping the customer in some way
“User experience is everything. It always has been, but it’s undervalued and underinvested in. If you don’t know user-centered design, study it. Hire people who know it. Obsess over it. Live and breathe it. Get your whole company on board.” Evan Williams, Co-Founder, Twitter. Question for you all. Is user-centred design under-invested in within the […]
“Technology provides no benefits of its own; it is the application of technology to business opportunities that produces ROI.” Robert McDowell. Let’s have a look at the quote above in the context of CSP service offerings, technology delivery methods and customer experiences. Let’s start with POTS – Plain Old Telephony Service. The customer experience (ie […]
“The only thing that seems to outpace the evolution of technology is the evolution of customer preferences and expectations. The resultant landscape is one of ever-shortening product lifecycles and frequent industry restructuring.” Neo Boon Siong. I attended the launch of Comptel’s Operation Nexterday last week. In support of the launch, they also have the book […]
“The telco industry is well known for having a five nines (ie 99.999%) up-time engineering standard. That’s about 5 minutes of down-time per year. That’s pretty impressive, although granted it still leaves room for improvement. OSS are used to measure figures like up-time (and many more of course). This gives CSPs the data to track […]
“People are too eager to say “This legendary person had flaws!” instead of, “Wow, this flawed human being managed to do something legendary.”” Mishell Baker. Interesting perspective from Mishell above, one which I concur with. As usual, I have a take on this in relation to OSS. I think we often spend so much time […]
“So I’m going to tell you, it’s going to be a good year. There are good players all over this country, and it is our job as a scouting department to find them, draft them, sign them, develop them, and help us to continue to win championships. So it’s going to be a good year.” […]
“Essential: Document with just barely good enough detail. Valuable: Document only when we actually need it, not when we want it. Timely: Documentation should be done in a just-in-time (JIT) manner, when we need it.” Ashish Sharma, here The Manifesto for Agile Software Development values “working software over comprehensive documentation”. This ethos is particularly relevant […]
“We see customers as invited guests for a party and we are the hosts. It is our job every day to make every aspect of the customer experience a little bit better.” Jeff Bezos. An earlier post discussed value chains and the newer paradigm of value fabrics. Another post indicated how the value fabric can […]
“The Biblical world view sees Earth and its ecosystems as the effect of a wise God’s creation and… therefore robust, resilient, and self-regulating, like the product of any good engineer.” Christopher Monckton. Yesterday’s post highlighted Jon Parrish’s five questions for establishing uniqueness of a product. It also spoke of the fragmentation of the OSS market […]
“The purpose of this white paper is to identify the essential Lifecycle Service Orchestration (LSO) and management capabilities necessary to achieve the key aims of the MEF’s Third Network1. These capabilities will allow the Third Network not only to dramatically decrease the time to establish or modify the characteristics of the end-to-end service, but will […]
“What the early adopter is buying, is some kind of change agent. By being the first to implement this change in their industry, the early adopters expect to get a jump on the competition, whether from lower product costs, faster time to market, more complete customer service, or some other comparable business advantage. They expect […]
“Do you think that such a role (a Chief Simplification Officer or Project Simplification Officer) is justified? If so, what do you think are the essential traits that this person would need?” I posed these questions in a recent article entitled, “Chief Simplification Officer,” so rather than just leave you with an open question, today […]
“What simple action could you take today to produce a new momentum toward success in your life?” Tony Robbins. Complexity is the single biggest challenge that stands in the way of us delivering OSS masterpieces. As described in, “The triple constraint of complexity,” the reduction of any complexity should have a multiplier effect towards the […]
“You need to overcome the tug of people against you as you reach for high goals.” George S. Patton. Long-time readers of this blog will be familiar with the use of Seth Godin’s thrashing principle in OSS to attempt to get a scope locked in and developed against. The reality is that despite all the […]
“It’s less about boxes and bases stations; it’s now a lot about software analytics, capability of reconfiguration and all that. It’s a very big shift from what we have seen in the last years.” Professor Mischa Dohler here. In the video in the link above, Prof Dohler suggests there are two major disruptions happening in […]
“The mind is seldom quickened to very vigorous operations but by pain, or the dread of pain. We do not disturb ourselves with the detection of fallacies which do us no harm..” Samuel Johnson. Operational Support Systems are exactly that – OPERATIONAL support systems. Many people in our industry lose sight of that fact sometimes. […]
“A while ago our world exploded. The environment and the world of towns and cities and families and communities blew apart, along with the world of ideas and information, of entertainment and communication, of politics and diplomacy, and of course the world of businesses and organisations. It’s hard to date when the explosion started, but […]
“Many believe effective networking is done face-to-face, building a rapport with someone by looking at them in the eye, leading to a solid connection and foundational trust.” Raymond Arroyo. As a typical engineer, when I first entered OSS projects my initial focus was on understanding the technologies and delivering the best technical solution that I […]
“Creativity’s about ownership.” John Maeda. The biggest profit you can make is from repeatedly selling something that you don’t own. Some versions of this model will send you to jail. Other versions can make you rich. John Reilly has proposed the value fabric concept, where third-party organisations become interwoven into the supply chain. In the […]
“When you hire somebody to cut your lawn, you don’t give them a list of all the blades of grass in your yard and the length to cut each one to (prescription), you tell them to make it look nice (intent) and they figure out the rest. Intent-based networking emphasizes the “cut my lawn” interface […]
