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.
Over the years, I’ve often referred to The Corkscrew Analogy or Momentum Spiral to describe a mindset of incremental improvement that’s needed to keep an OSS project moving forward. Rather than trying to jump straight from scratch (blue dot) to perfection / completion (yellow dot), it’s far more helpful to make many smaller steps and […]
We’ve embarked on a journey of trying to plan for the future of OSS/BSS, not by predicting the future, but by seeking ways to be ready for possible future situations by using Peter Schwartz’s scenario planning technique. Using this technique, we’ve identified four possible future scenarios for telco based on two high-impact variables (tech growth […]
In recent articles, we’ve discussed how Private Equity (PE) could help to reshape the struggling telecommunications business models and how OSS/BSS stacks touch almost every part of a telco business model without most people even realising it (as per the diagram below). We’ve also discussed how the pragmatism of Tier-2 telco thinking could be a […]
In recent years, we’ve seen a rise in traditional telecommunications providers selling off tranches of tower assets. These sell-offs have likely occurred for a variety of reasons – to help fund 5G roll-outs, to pay down debt, to invest in further digital transformation projects, etc. In short, capital demands / ambitions appear to often exceed […]
When you’re a senior exec in a telco and you’ve been made responsible for allocating resources, it’s unlikely that you ever think, “gee, we really should give our operations teams some new operations systems (OSS/BSS) to work with.” It would be nice if they did, but that’s just not what they’re thinking about. For the […]
If you’re a regular reader of the PAOSS blog, you might have noticed that we’ve been generating at least one deep-dive tech report per year. Last year it was AIOps of the Future, the year before it was The Most Exciting OSS/BSS Innovations, and Inventory of the Future, etc. We’ve loved using these freely downloadable reports […]
In recent years, we’ve been trying to generate at least one deep-dive tech report per year here at PAOSS. Last year it was AIOps of the Future, the year before it was The Most Exciting OSS/BSS Innovations, etc. They tend to be an itch that we want to scratch for ourselves, but they’ve had an […]
We’ve recently been talking about the chasm between OSS buyers and sellers. OSS buyers and sellers desperately need each other to improve the effectiveness of the entire telecommunications industry. The size of the chasm is harming both sides. In part 2 of the “buyer-seller chasm” series, three of the biggest contributing factors were identified as: […]
In recent times, we’ve seen widespread damage caused by cybersecurity events impacting the telecommunications industry. Unfortunately, we’re rapidly approaching another monumental cliff for security of telecommunications (and all the industries that rely on electronic communications). The same cliff is something the OSS/BSS industry also needs to be patently aware of. Traditional cryptographic algorithms, which underpin […]
The early 2000s (when I first started out in, and fell in love with, the OSS industry) saw many Tier-1 telcos make large OSS and BSS transformation investments. Prior to that, they’d largely run their operations from NMS level and/or using home-grown systems. Since there weren’t many existing OSS to unseat, these projects were mostly […]
Christel Heydemann, Orange’s CEO, brought to our attention at MWC 2023 that a survey of European telcos indicated that almost half of the polled CEOs do not expect their businesses to make it through another decade. That’s a pretty scary thing to think about if you’ve built your career around the telco industry and don’t […]
This is the fifth of the “buyer / seller” chasm articles (pt1, pt2, pt3, pt4). We’d previously highlighted the issues, the pain points, the sources of friction and more about getting Buyers and Sellers together to build better telcos. But in today’s article we’ll complete the solutions list that we started on in part four, […]
This is the fourth of the “buyer / seller” chasm articles (pt1, pt2, pt3). We’ve already highlighted the issues, the pain points, the sources of friction and more about getting Buyers and Sellers together to build better telcos. But in today’s article we’ll explore some possibilities for how to overcome those challenges by building bridges […]
This is the third part of a series that looks into the chasm that exists between OSS/BSS buyers (eg carriers, ISPs, utilities, etc) and sellers (OSS/BSS product vendors). In part 2 we pondered whether it’s possible to target a 10x reduction in operational costs. We’ll take a closer look into what this means with the […]
Our previous post highlighted a chasm between buyers and sellers. It has sparked quite a lot of conversation, which is exactly as intended. In another earlier post about telco reaching its burning exchange moment, we wrote: In a keynote speech at Mobile World Congress (MWC), Thierry Breton, the European Union’s internal market commissioner opined, “In […]
I’m currently lucky enough to be involved in a couple of vendor selection processes where we’re helping carriers (buyers) to find the best-fit OSS vendors (sellers) for their needs. Most start a vendor selection process by preparing a looooong list of requirements. This approach takes forever to write, forever to respond to and forever to […]
Many years ago, I was lucky enough to spend a year advising the executive team of an Asian monopoly carrier. I was helping them to implement their first ever OSS project. It was a real eye-opener on many different levels. This carrier had a strong culture of hoarding knowledge. It was well known amongst the […]
I’m really excited to announce that a project we kicked off in collaboration with Ramandeep Bhalla, Deepak Kakadia and Rakesh Ashok, all the way back in March of 2023, has finally launched. It got a whole lot bigger than I was originally expecting. It’s nearly 100 pages long, well over 30,000 words and over 40 […]
When I first left uni with my freshly minted degrees, whenever I thought of salespeople, I had an image something like the one below in my head. This image might still be true if you’re on the hunt for a used clunker. However, nothing could be further from the truth for the salespeople that make […]
In a recent article, we compared how telco holds itself accountable to its internally adored five-nine availability standards, yet still has cellar-dwelling customer satisfaction scores. When you consider the expanse and complexity of the global telco network, and the millions of micro-events that occur on it each day, telco networks are amazingly resilient. Telcos certainly […]
