OSS are tools that help to make lives easier for CSP users and their customers. Here I present ideas for new OSS tools or innovations
By now I’m sure you’ve heard about graph databases. You may’ve even read my earlier article about the benefits graph databases offer when modelling network inventory when compared with relational databases. But have you heard the Graphene Database Analogy? It can help conceptualise the migrating, cross-linking and fixing of data sets. I equate OSS data […]
“You don’t get differential advantage from your products, it’s from the way you speak to and relate to your customers . All products are excellent these days.” The quote above paraphrases Malcolm McDonald from a podcast about his book, “Malcolm McDonald on Value Propositions: How to Develop Them, How to Quantify Them.” This quote had […]
Have you ever experienced an epic customer experience (CX) fail when dealing a network service operator, like the one I described yesterday? In that example, the OSS/BSS, and possibly the associated people / process, had a direct impact on poor customer experience. Admittedly, that 7 truck-roll experience was a number of years ago now. We […]
Have you seen OSS tools where the applications are brilliant but consigned to failure by bad data? I definitely have! I call it the data death spiral. It’s a well known fact in the industry that bad data can ruin an OSS. You know it. I know it. Everyone knows it. But how many companies […]
The diagram below has some parallels with OSS. The story however is a little long before it gets to the OSS part, so please bear with me. The diagram shows analysis the US Navy performed during WWII on where planes were being shot. The theory was that they should be reinforcing the areas that received […]
Yesterday’s post mentioned the importance of setting a future vision as part of your MVP delivery strategy. As Steve Blank said here, “Founders act like the “minimum” part is the goal. Or worse, that every potential customer should want it. In the real world not every customer is going to get overly excited about your minimum […]
“This minimum feature set (sometimes called the “minimum viable product”) causes lots of confusion. Founders act like the “minimum” part is the goal. Or worse, that every potential customer should want it. In the real world not every customer is going to get overly excited about your minimum feature set. Only a special subset of […]
Today’s is something of a heretical post, especially for the believers in ITIL. In the world of OSS, we look to build in layers of resiliency and not layers of redundancy. The following diagram and subsequent text in italics describes a typical ITIL process and is all taken from https://www.computereconomics.com/article.cfm?id=1074 The sequence of events as shown […]
Have you noticed an increasing presence of open-source tools in your OSS recently? Have you also noticed that open-source is helping to trigger transformation? Have you thought about why that might be? Some might rightly argue that it is the cost factor. You could also claim that they tend to help resolve specific, but common, […]
You already know that speed is important for OSS users. They / we don’t want to wait for minutes for the OSS to respond to a simple query. That’s obvious right? The bleeding obvious. But that’s not what today’s post is about. So then, what is it about? Actually, it follows on from yesterday’s post […]
Friday’s post posed a re-framing exercise that asked you (whether customer, seller or integrator) to run a planning exercise as if you MUST offer a money-back guarantee on your OSS (whether internal or external). It’s designed to force a change in mindset from risk mitigation to risk removal. We have another re-framing exercise for you […]
We’ve talked about some of the emotions we experience in the OSS industry earlier this week, the trauma of OSS and anxiety relating to OSS. To avoid these types of miserable feelings, it’s human nature to seek to limit them. We over-analyse, we over-specify, we over-engineer, we over-document, we over-contract, we over-react, we over-estimate (nah, […]
About 6-8 years ago, I was becoming achingly aware that I’d passed well beyond an information overload (I-O) threshold. More information was reaching my brain each day than I was able to assimilate, process and archive. What to do? Well, I decided to stop reading newspapers and watching the news, in fact almost all television. […]
This is the third in a series on ZTA, following on from yesterday’s post that suggested intentionally triggering events to allow the accumulation of a much larger library of historical network data. Today we’ll look at the impact of data collection on our ability to achieve ZTA and refer back to part 1 in the […]
Yesterday we described the three steps on the path to Zero Touch Assurance: Monitoring – Monitoring the events that happen in the network and responding manually Post-cognition – Monitoring events / trends that happen in the network, comparing them to past situations (using analytics to identify repeating patterns), using the past to recommend (or automate) […]
A couple of years ago, we published a series on pre-cognitive OSS based on the following quote by Ben Evans about three classes of search/discovery: 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 […]
On Tuesday we pondered, “Would an OSS duopoly be a good thing?” It cited two examples of operating systems amongst other famous duopolies: Microsoft / Apple (PC operating systems) Google / Apple (smartphone operating systems) Yesterday we provided an example of why consolidation is so much more challenging for OSS companies than say for Coke […]
On Friday, we published a post entitled, “Think for a moment…” which posed the question of whether we might be better-served looking back at our most important existing features and streamlining them rather than inventing new features to solve that have little impact. Over the weekend, a promotional email landed in my inbox from Nightingale […]
“Many of the most important new companies, including Google, Facebook, Amazon, Netflix, Snapchat, Uber, Airbnb and more are winning not by giving good-enough solutions…, but rather by delivering a superior experience….” Ben Thompson, stratechery.com Think for a moment about the millions of developer hours that have gone into creating today’s OSS tools. Think also for […]
As a project for 2019, we’re considering the development of a how-to training course that provides a step-by-step guide to build your own OSS sandpit to play with. It will be built around cloud-native and open-source components. It will be cutting-edge and micro-scaled (but highly scalable in case you want to grow it). Does this […]
