OSS are tools have a big part to play in modern ICT organisations. They can make the difference between effective or ineffective operations of electronic assets. The Executive Series of blogs provide information that is targeted for senior executives on how to utilise OSS to deliver better business outcomes.
I have a really important question for you to ask yourself today. It’s a question that shapes a lot of our thinking about how I can help the OSS/BSS/telco industry. How does what I do make more money for clients? Not just what your company does. Not what your brand says on the website. Not […]
We’re releasing our latest report today. Click on the image below to download it. Why are transformation approvals (eg business case approvals, vendor selections, project transformation decisions) forced to look perfect when delivery is anything but? That is the quiet contradiction at the heart of many (most?) digital transformation programmes. We build business cases as […]
As seen in the diagram, for most of telecom history, the core business model has been simple: Build networks Sell access to those networks Recover capital (revenue) through subscription and usage revenues, and Protect margin through scale and operational efficiency But what happens if (when? after?) that model breaks? What happens if connectivity becomes so […]
If you’re leading an OSS/BSS transformation, one of the hardest parts is not knowing what needs to happen first (or second, third, etc). Not in theory. In practice. Most large transformation programmes don’t fail because of a lack of ambition. They fail because the early sequencing is off or steps are overlooked. Vendor conversations begin […]
With MWC upon us again, I thought I’d pose a question about how our industry, and the 500+ OSS/BSS vendor market within it, is currently evolving. Telcos spend billions on transformation programmes every year. They talk about massive disruption like cloud-native stacks, open architectures, AI-driven automation and next-generation digital experiences. On paper, it sounds like […]
Quants have become the rockstars of modern share trading – extracting powerful signals from oceans of data at near real-time speed. Trading firms invest billions in them and in infrastructure that will give them even the slightest timing edge. Yet while telcos drown in dashboards, the next competitive advantage may belong to the “NOC-star” – […]
Have you ever wondered why there’s such a big deal made of the start of a marriage (there’s a whole industry built around engagements and weddings), but there’s almost no fanfare at the end? Samuel Thompson pointed this out on Greg Isenberg’s podcast. Samuel highlighted that there are lots of products designed for the start […]
Whether we like it or not, most of us judge books by their covers. Sometimes that’s visual. Sometimes it’s the title. But here’s a thing I find interesting. Having written a couple of books myself, a lot of thought goes into choosing the title to resonate with the viewing audience. And yet, sometimes a title […]
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 […]
We speak with buyers and sellers every week, and one word keeps repeating. Trust. It keeps appearing in buyer conversations and seller conversations alike. It’s more than a word though. It’s costing the telco industry millions. When trust is missing, 18-24 month buying cycles become the default. This is the Buyer – Seller Chasm that […]
The promise is simple: let AI handle the easy work, and humans focus on the hard work, the challenging work, the fun work. But the hard work is hard because it depends on intuition and experience that comes from years of guidance doing the easy work (the apprenticeship). So if AI handles all of the […]
We’re already seeing it. AI is slowly infiltrating telecom, one little project at a time… monitoring, automating, optimising. In AI, we have one of the most disruptive opportunities of our lifetime, but the results of telco AI projects to date still feel eerily familiar. Are most telcos using tomorrow’s tools with yesterday’s thinking? Maybe the […]
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 […]
The story of Berkshire Hathaway is a famous one. It started in textiles but Warren Buffett chose to drastically change strategy because the textiles industry was dying. You’d have to say his decision has proven to be correct. If it stayed in textiles, Buffett would almost certainly not be as famous as he is today. […]
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 […]
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: […]
Telcos are built for resilience.But when a critical exchange burned to the ground in regional Australia, it exposed the industry’s greatest weakness and its greatest strength are one and the same: the ability to adapt. What happened to Warrnambool Exchange in 2012 wasn’t just a fire. It was a story that shattered the commonly held […]
The answer is a categorical no! Telco was once the place for moonshot thinkers and industry-shaping tech. Do you remember when telco was exciting? When engineers solved big problems and OSS was a creative playground? Unfortunately, telco today has a growing energy crisis. Not just in its tower sites and data centres, but an energy […]
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 […]
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 […]
