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.
“We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters.” Peter Thiel. This meme speaks of the innovation occurring in the world of technology. It seems that we are making fewer major innovations (flying cars) compared with the world-changing innovations that are really only minor in terms of technological breakthroughs (like Twitter’s 140 characters). When reading, […]
Data integrity law #1 – Natural Decay – When being handled, the accuracy / integrity of a data set tends to degrade over time. Data integrity law #2 – The Need for Curation – To prevent rule #1 from making the data unusable, the data needs to be curated. Data integrity law #3 – The […]
“Telcos spent all this money, built all the infrastructure, hired all these clever people, imagined and planned and consulted for all of it, have all this market power, and they’ll get none of it.” Ben Evans talking about mobile Internet. Ben has a point. Telcos spent huge amounts of money building the infrastructure to support mobile […]
The OSS market is segmented. That means its talent is too. The question I often ponder is how do we reach the critical mass of talent required to take OSS to its lofty potential? How do we get its virtuosos in a single place for months on end to solve its biggest problems (and there […]
Why do so many of the new buzz technologies, such as Internet of Things and analytics exist to provide faster / better feedback but OSS generally doesn’t make more use of it? Sure, we provide dashboards and lists that provide customers with feedback, but are we using feedback enough to make our solutions better? We […]
“Steam engine time is a period of time when many inventors all over the world, despite isolation from each other, and with no contact with each other in any way, begin inventing a similar technology with a coincidental commonality of ideas.” Urban Dictionary. Another perspective on steam engine time is a period where there are […]
“Doing one thing well is hard. Doing more than one thing well at the same time is exponentially harder. Clarity and focus are what generate excellence. They bring the attention to detail, dedication and obsession which begets success. It’s impossible to be obsessed about more than one thing at the same time. If you believe, […]
“A players hire A+ players.Actually, Steve believed that A players hire A players—that is people who are as good as they are. I refined this slightly—my theory is that A players hire people even better than themselves. It’s clear, though, that B players hire C players so they can feel superior to them, and C […]
“I like to think that if I’d been at Kitty Hawk in 1903 when Orville Wright took off, I would have been farsighted enough, and public-spirited enough–I owed this to future capitalists–to shoot him down. I mean, Karl Marx couldn’t have done as much damage to capitalists as Orville did. I won’t dwell on other […]
“He [Barry Schwartz] suggests that because we are presented with so much information, the overload of options and data leads us to falsely believe that, even a fairly mundane task like shopping for toothpaste, has greater significance than it really does.” Howstuffworks.com. Why do 5-10yo kids know what profession they want to do but by […]
“Your financial planner, real estate agent, and accountant all call your house an asset. But in reality, an asset is only something that puts money in your pocket. If you have a house that you rent out to tenants, then it’s an asset. If you have a house, paid for or not, that you live […]
“Lethargy bordering on sloth remains the cornerstone of our investment style.” Warren Buffett in his 1990 Chairman’s Letter. It’s been said that 90% of Warren Buffett’s immense wealth has been derived from just 10 deals. That’s 10 deals in roughly 60 years of investing. Warren undoubtedly gets to see many opportunities but only invests in […]
Efficiency experts refer to getting to genba (or gemba), a Japanese term for “the real place” or the place where the “real” work gets done. lt’s the place where every movement is vital and any inefficiency or waste is a target for improvement. In OSS, genba resides in two places – the product development and […]
A great friend of mine, Evan, and I recently caught up with Mike Lawrey, the Chairman of the TM Forum. Mike spoke to us about some interesting initiatives the TM Forum has in the pipeline, including some that build upon the success of their Smart City Forum. You may have noticed that I regularly discuss […]
In our life and our OSS we’re now bombarded with so much info that it can be overwhelming. We have to understand what really matters to know how to set up the right filters. Have you ever noticed how life in OSS, just like our email inboxes, is an endless stream of activities with a […]
“On Monday this week taxi app Lyft raising a new $1bn round which included $500m from General Motors. Twelve months ago the received wisdom was that Uber was on a tear and it’s competitors would fail and in response to this funding news LA Times wrote a piece questioning whether the ‘winner takes all phenomenon’ that […]
Do end customers buy bandwidth off CSPs because they really want a data service? No? To deliver entertainment services; to deliver communications with friends, family and customers; to deliver learnIng; to facilitate shopping; to spread an organisation’s selling messages across multiple channels and provide near-real-time response metrics on each; to build marketplaces; to deliver; to […]
“You’ve got Amazon knowing everything about purchasing, Google knowing everything about what people do on the Internet, and Salesforce knowing everything about the revenue side of a business.” Scott Raney. The big question for CSPs as they make the transition to the more modern Digital Service Provider (DSP) business models is, “what big thing can […]
OSS has a bad name amongst many of our customers. Yes, even though they invest billions in our industry each year. Do they consider us a necessary evil? Quality, dependability, repeatability. These are the catch-cries of success in many industries. TGW (things gone wrong) per million or per thousand are common metrics that are the bellweather […]
“Are you an expert at something that actually generates value?” Seth Godin in a recent post called, “No direction home.” Seth’s post is actually about finding a job in a different way than most people try, one that I’m also a big advocate of. The quote above though is a very philosophical one for all […]
