Leading questions for change

“Answers to leading questions under torture naturally tell us nothing about the beliefs of the accused; but they are good evidence for the beliefs of the accusers.” C.S. Lewis. Today I’d like to share a clever strategy used by a clever OSS division head that l once worked with. The team he led was in […]

Small-grid OSS business model

“Companies often see the disruptive forces affecting their industry. They frequently divert sufficient resources to participate in emerging markets. Their failure is usually an inability to truly embrace the new business models the disruptive change opens up. Kodak created a digital camera, invested in the technology, and even understood that photos would be shared online. […]

Spectacular success – wrong conclusions

“Spectacular success doesn’t lead to deep introspection, which in turn leads to wrong conclusions. You see this all the time, right? Successful companies draw conclusions about how smart and good they are, and then a significant number of them fall off the cliff because they drew the wrong conclusions.” Ed Catmull (of Pixar) here. The […]

Gridlocked OSS cityscapes

“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 […]

OSS career pathways

One of the biggest challenges for an OSS team is finding (and keeping) resources that know the industry, know their technologies and know why / how their OSS helps their customers (ie tripods). One approach is to get battle-hardened OSS resources from outside, put them into senior positions, and build teams around them. This approach […]

OSS are hidden away

“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 core of this digital ecosystem

“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 […]

The cherry on top

Last week we ran a series of blogs about what the OSS of the future is going to look like. It’s going to be simple, not cluttered. It’s going to provide answers, not just reams of information. It’s going to allow operators to throw questions at it, in natural speech. It may even provide you […]

Festina lente OSS

The picture you see below is of a coin minted by Roman Emperor Titus. It is the visualisation of the oxymoron of Festina Lente, or hasten slowly, where dolphins were known for their speed and the anchor for its stability. In terms of OSS, this is mirrored in the dichotomy of the speed of change […]

Answers, not information

Just thinking about yesterday’s blog (about how OSS will become Whole of Business Support Systems and what impact that will have on the UI) when something quite simple dawned on me… In most cases, OSS should be designed to provide answers, not just information. But in most cases today, the opposite is true. We have […]

Just being the glue

Last week we discussed whether big OSS was losing relevance and our tools are just operational support systems (little oss). I firmly believe that the future for OSS, a future that already exists in some organisations, is for OSS to produce relevant insights and efficiency far beyond just operational teams. They need to be relevant […]

Continuous improvement begets enduring success

“My initial reaction to the idea that continuous improvement begets enduring success was ‘makes sense, companies need to reinvent themselves if they want to stay on top for multiple decades and continuous improvement will do that for you’, but that underplays the importance of the point. An insatiable desire for everything to be the best […]

The Law of Significance in OSS

“For the person trying to do everything alone, the game really is over. If you want to do something big, you must link up with others. One is too small a number to achieve greatness. That’s the Law of Significance.” John C Maxwell. In the past, national telcos have been able to achieve greatness alone […]

The OSS Whale Curve

The diagram below shows what is known as The Whale Curve. It shows a graph of the relative profitability of each product in your product mix. From the book, “Waging War on Complexity Costs,” by Steven A Wilson and Andrei Perumal. You might be wondering how a profitability graph could ever peak at over 100%. […]

Establishing an OSS from scratch

I was recently asked how I would go about building up an OSS from scratch. To be honest, I didn’t do a great job of explaining it at the time despite having done it at four tier-1 carriers in the past. Well, not exactly from scratch, as each of these carriers had operated from NMS […]

Augmenting our OSS brains

“…the program “The Brain,” in which Dr David Eagleman, neuroscientist, NYT bestselling author and Guggenheim Fellow shared a fascinating but little known secret…our brains are specifically designed so that we learn on the job – by doing. Dr Eagleman explained that this is why human babies do not have anywhere near the survival skills possessed […]

Creating OSS differentiation

“It’s astounding to see the huge range of products and services that are becoming commoditized. Consumers can’t see differences between major brands in most categories, and as a result, many are buying based on price. If companies want to increase their margins — maybe even survive — they must learn how to develop value-add brands […]

Precognitive OSS

Late last week we borrowed from Ben Evan’s three classes of search/discovery to look into what the future holds for OSS. There is giving you what you already know you want (Amazon, Google) There is working out what you want (Amazon and Google’s aspiration) And then there is suggesting what you might want (Heywood Hill). […]

lt’s been a bit quiet here

Well, it’s been a bit quiet here on PAOSS in the last week hasn’t it? The new blogs each weekday have been absent. What’s my excuse you’re wondering. Paternity leave has gotten in the way of putting pen to website. That and the sleep deprivation that comes with a newborn. Despite this, I’ve still found […]

Bitten by an elephant

“Hands up if you have ever been bitten by an elephant? Now hands up if you have ever been bitten by a mosquito? See, it’s the little things in life that will get you” Joel Weldon paraphrased.” Put another way, “the devil is in the details.” This mindset has always perplexed me, particularly in the […]