Is AI a digital transformation bridge or noose? (Part 5 – Precedents and Summation)
The last four articles have explored the way some telcos are using AI technologies counter-productively today – AI entanglement, transformation planning, dependency visibility and the hazards of autonomy. The final question for this article is whether telcos can or will ever earn the right to unplug their legacy OSS. In Part 4, we ended with […]
Is AI a digital transformation bridge or noose? (part 4 – Autonomy Hazards)
I’ve never achieved true autonomy in an end-to-end, complex telco environment. What follows is a hypothesis. I’d love to hear your thoughts and clarifications. What I have achieved are small autonomous solutions that did work nicely, until a single baseline parameter changed. Then assumptions broke, dependencies surfaced and entire solutions + datasets had to be […]
Is AI a digital transformation bridge or noose? (part 3 – Dependency Visibility)
Many (myself included), believe that recent progress in AI-based technologies should accelerate digital transformation (even if only by inspiring us to think differently about the digital systems we already have). However, in Part 1 of this series we explored a paradox. The most common uses of AI today are not loosening the grip of legacy […]
Is AI a digital transformation bridge or noose? (part 2 – Transformation Planning)
In Part 1 of this series, we explored an uncomfortable paradox. AI is being excitedly positioned as the key to telco transformation, yet many initiatives are quietly reinforcing the same legacy digital landscapes they would love to replace. That leads to a more fundamental question. Before choosing AI models, architectures, or tooling, must we actually […]
Is AI a digital transformation bridge or noose? (part 1 – AI Entanglement)
Like microservices before it, AI and agentic solutions are increasingly seen as the panacea of digital transformation. In telco circles, AI is often framed as the fastest path to escape. A way to finally move beyond the clunky, legacy worlds of OSS/BSS. Piecemeal AI projects promise quick wins, modern capabilities, and a stepping stone towards […]
Are we missing something? Is AI building a house with many competing thermostats?
I’d always assumed that more feedback loops meant better control, and faster / smarter / optimal operations. But what happens when each system has its own idea of what “smart” or “optimal” even means? Are we, in fact, optimising our way into instability and inefficiency? Could hundreds of competing feedback loops be automating misalignment faster […]
12 reasons why our OSS get better by wearing hi-viz vests
Ever noticed how many OSS decisions are made by people who have never set foot on site? What if your single most powerful OSS upgrade this year is a day riding shotgun with field techs in a hi-viz vest? This article digs into the quiet damage that OSS experts with a total lack of field […]
Telco is a Circus with Thousands of Balls in the Air
Are you frustrated by the complexity of your OSS/BSS factory? With hundreds or even thousands of systems, all trying to juggle thousands of activities without dropping the ball is like organised chaos. But what if we’re looking at it all wrong, both in the way we’ve always designed our legacy application architectures and how we’re […]
Stop the Archaeological Dig: Bringing Your OSS Dinosaur Back to Life
Are you worried that your OSS/BSS stack, or parts of it, might be in desperate need of an overhaul? Many OSS experts love being archaeologists, down on their knees, carefully brushing off the dust to unearth their OSS fossil and painstakingly preserving it. But modern network operations aren’t archaeological digs. We can’t just make educated guesses […]
What to Build, What to Drop: A Product Roadmap Scorecard for OSS/BSS Tools that Endure (part 4)
Most OSS/BSS roadmaps today overflow with novelty and buzz. You might even hear the words Agentic AI come up (not that I have anything against it but it can be a little over-hyped at times). But this series has taken a different path. We’ve looked at how to build a model that looks for enduring […]
Want to Design an OSS/BSS Architecture to be Relevant for 10+ Years? Learning from Lindy and the Porsche 911 (part 3)
Modern telco software roadmaps tend to be full of novel features. But what if none of that novelty is enduring? What if the silhouette of the Porsche 911 guides us on what should be included in our next OSS roadmap? The City Map From article 1 in this series, The Lindy Effect tells us that […]
Turn Incidents Into Resilience X-rays: Using Network Outages as Complexity Audits (part 2)
After a major outage, we conduct PIRs (Post Incident Reviews). If we find something, we usually add controls. But when you think about it, that’s a bit like bandages on an infected wound – more layers, more failure points and potentially even a wider blast radius. The durable fix is more clinical: identify and remove […]
Can you predict the Next 40 years of OSS/BSS? The Lindy Effect might help (part 1)
When you’re planning your next-generation OSS/BSS roadmap, what’s guiding your decisions? Are you looking for and/or researching features that have never been seen before? Are you finding new problems to solve? That’s our (my) typical mindset isn’t it? What if I instead pointed you to a little-known framework that looks deep into the past to […]
Same Telco, Different World-views: 5 Lessons from IBM in the 1990s in Building Alignment
According to Russ Hill, IBM had 27 top priorities in the 1990s, and only 3 of them aligned. Telcos today aren’t far off. The cost? Misaligned missions and fragmented customer outcomes. When Lou Gerstner took over IBM in 1993, he found a company with no shortage of smart people or strategies or good intentions. But […]
OSS Buyers think they Buy with Logic… But none of us do
You’re in the business of OSS sales (we’re all in the business of OSS sales if we want to work on an OSS project). Your OSS sales assets are full of facts, features and benefits. That fits perfectly for every buyer who thinks and says their procurement decisions are logical and calculated. Just one problem: […]
Infographic – A step-by-step Guide to building your OSS Data Governance Framework
Telcos are drowning in data, but few treat it as a managed, strategic asset. Without governance, OSS initiatives falter under poor quality, fragmented and inconsistent information. Data quality decays over time. Without the right governance, poor data can send your systems and processes into a death spiral, no matter how good they are. Taking a […]
The Iteration Game: Which Surprising Telco Assets get more Valuable over Time?
If asked to think about telco’s most valuable assets, most people think spectrum, networks and customers. But if we think a bit more laterally, telcos have other compounding growth engines that are never discussed, to the point of being invisible. In fact, the assets that have the potential to compound fastest probably don’t even appear […]
From Mercedes Star to North Star: Three Cheat-Sheets for Uniting OSS Transformations
When we’re passionate about OSS and we discuss OSS/BSS transformation, the context is almost always centred around the technology. But if technology was the real barrier, most telcos would already be running the sleek digital operations of their dreams by now. As we found in the previous article about telco world views, the real drag […]
Multiple Worldviews, One Telco: When our Mercedes Stars don’t Align
In telcos, everyone’s working toward the same goal right? Well, we all know that’s not exactly right. Speak to the CEO, the CFO, the CTO, the COO, the CMO, etc, and you could end up thinking they’re talking about different companies (a bit like the story of the six blind men and an elephant). And […]
The secret to winning in Service Assurance? Updating your thinking faster than competitors
Network downtime can cost millions per hour, so service and network assurance have never been more critical. But here’s the interesting thing – have you also noticed that many organisations still rely on reactive firefighting supplemented with a few rules-based automations, heavy use of CLIs, alarm lists and human-centric “tick and flick” incident management? When […]