I have the need for OSS speed
You already know that speed is important for OSS users. They / we don’t want to wait for minutes for the OSS to respond to a simple query. That’s obvious right? The bleeding obvious. But that’s not what today’s post is about. So then, what is it about? Actually, it follows on from yesterday’s post […]
Re-framing an OSS replacement strategy
Friday’s post posed a re-framing exercise that asked you (whether customer, seller or integrator) to run a planning exercise as if you MUST offer a money-back guarantee on your OSS (whether internal or external). It’s designed to force a change in mindset from risk mitigation to risk removal. We have another re-framing exercise for you […]
What’s the one big factor holding back your OSS? And the exercise to reduce it
We’ve talked about some of the emotions we experience in the OSS industry earlier this week, the trauma of OSS and anxiety relating to OSS. To avoid these types of miserable feelings, it’s human nature to seek to limit them. We over-analyse, we over-specify, we over-engineer, we over-document, we over-contract, we over-react, we over-estimate (nah, […]
Identifying the fault-lines that trigger OSS churn
“Most people slog through their days in a dark funk. They almost never get to do anything interesting or go to interesting places or meet interesting people. They are ignored by marketers who want them to buy their overpriced junk and be grateful for it. They feel disrespected, unappreciated and taken for granted. Nobody wants […]
Addressing the trauma of OSS
“You also have to understand their level of trauma. Your product, service or information is selling a solution to someone who is in trauma. There are different levels, from someone who needs a nail to finish the swing set in their backyard to someone who just found out they have a life-threatening disease. All of […]
Would an OSS duopoly be a good thing?
The products/vendors page here on PAOSS has a couple of hundred entries currently. We’re currently working on an extended list that will almost double the number on it. More news on that shortly. The level of fragmentation fascinates me, but if I’m completely honest, it probably disappoints me too. It’s great that it’s providing the […]
Think for a moment…
“Many of the most important new companies, including Google, Facebook, Amazon, Netflix, Snapchat, Uber, Airbnb and more are winning not by giving good-enough solutions…, but rather by delivering a superior experience….” Ben Thompson, stratechery.com Think for a moment about the millions of developer hours that have gone into creating today’s OSS tools. Think also for […]
Nobody dabbles at dentistry
“There are some jobs that are only done by accredited professionals. And then there are most jobs, jobs that some people do for fun, now and then, perhaps in front of the bathroom mirror. It’s difficult to find your footing when you’re a logo designer, a comedian or a project manager. Because these are gigs […]
The bird’s wings analogy for OSS RFPs
“A bird sitting on a tree is never afraid of the branch breaking, because her trust is not on the branch but on it’s own wings.” Unknown. Last month, we posted a series entitled “How to kill the RFP.” The RFP is a common mechanism for reaching a purchasing agreement between OSS provider and network […]
OSS come in all shapes and sizes
As the OSS vendors / suppliers page here on PAOSS shows, there are a LOT of different OSS options, making it an extremely fragmented market. But there’s something of a reason for that fragmentation – customer requirements for OSS come in all shapes and sizes. Here are four of the major categories that I’ve been […]
What to read from a simple little OSS job advertisement from AWS
Not sure if you noticed, but AWS posted this job advertisement on LinkedIn a couple of days ago – Business Portfolio Leader – Telecom OSS/BSS Solutions. The advertisement includes the following text: “Amazon Web Services (AWS) is leading the next paradigm shift in computing and is looking for a world class candidate to manage an […]
How to kill the OSS RFP (part 3)
As the title suggests, this is the third in a series of articles spawned by TM Forum’s initiative to investigate better procurement practices than using RFI / RFP processes. There’s no doubt the RFI / RFP / contract model can be costly and time-consuming. To be honest, I feel the RFI / RFP process can […]
How to kill the OSS RFP
TM Forum is currently investigating ways to procure OSS without resorting to the current RFI / RFP approach. It has published the following survey results. . As it shows, the RFI / RFP isn’t fit for purpose for suppliers and customers alike. It’s not just the RFI/RFP process. We could extend this further and include […]
Why does everyone know an operator’s business better than the operator?
The headline today blatantly steals from a post by William Webb. You can read his entire, brilliant post here. All quotes below are from the article. William’s concept aligns quite closely with yesterday’s article regarding external insights that don’t quite marry up with the real situation faced by operators. “At the Great Telco Debate this […]
OSS answers that are simple but wrong vs complex but right
“We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills…” John F Kennedy. Let’s face it. The business of running a telco is complex. […]
The Theory of Evolution, OSS evolution
“Evolution says that biological change is a property of populations — that every individual is a trial run of an experimental combination of traits, and that at the end of the trial, you are done and discarded, and the only thing that matters is what aggregate collection of traits end up in the next generation. […]
That’s not where to disrupt your OSS
The diagram below comes from an actual client’s functionality usage profile. The x-axis shows the functionality / use-cases. The y-axis shows the number of uses (it could equally represent usefulness or value). Each big-impact demand (ie individual bars on the left-side of the graph) warrants separate investigation. The bars on the right side (ie the […]
The OSS proof-of-worth dilemma
Earlier this week we posted an article describing Sutton’s Law of OSS, which effectively tells us to go where the money is. The article suggested that in OSS we instead tend towards the exact opposite – the inverse-Sutton – we go to where the money isn’t. Instead of robbing banks like Willie Sutton, we break […]
Sutton’s Law of OSS
Willie Sutton was an accomplished bank robber, particularly during the 1920s and 1930. Named after Willie, Sutton’s Law effectively states, “I go to where the money is,” which was supposedly Sutton’s response to a reporter’s question asking why he robbed banks instead of easier targets. Interestingly for the OSS industry, we seem to follow the […]
The culture required to support Telkomsel’s OSS/BSS transformation
Yesterday’s post described the ways in which Telkomsel has strategically changed their value-chain to attract revenues with greater premiums than the traditional model of a telco. They’ve used a new digital core and an API framework to help facilitate their business model transformation. As promised yesterday, we’ll take a slightly closer look at the culture […]