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
“The Navy has both a tradition and a future–and we look with pride and confidence in both directions.” Admiral George Anderson In days gone by, CSPs enjoyed command of the sea. Their boats were big, powerful and mobile enough to move around world. However, due to their size it requires significant planning and effort for a […]
“The ability to simplify means to eliminate the unnecessary so that the necessary may speak.” Hans Hofmann OSS vendors have already developed alarm “prioritisation” tools such as de-duplication, escalation, suppression, correlation, etc to help reduce noise. Root-cause Analysis is only as good as the gurus who can identify the patterns of events and then build […]
“To the man who only has a hammer, everything he encounters begins to look like a nail.” Abraham Maslow In the case of OSS, our hammer is the computer monitor, keyboard and mouse, which are the weapons of choice for interacting with the OSS tools. But are they the best I/O (Input / Output) devices […]
“It’s better to hang out with people better than you. Pick out associates whose behavior is better than yours and you’ll drift in that direction.” Warren Buffett How many gun network firefighters write OSS code? And how many gun OSS coders fix CSP networks for a living? And how many business analysts can do both? […]
“Garbage In, Garbage Out“ Computer Industry Proverb Let me ask you the following questions: Are you having data accuracy problems, particularly in your Outside Plant Network? Are your network operators and planners losing faith in the data stored in your NMS/OSS and having to adopt workarounds that cause further degradation of data integrity? Worse still, are they wasting […]
“Be faithful to that which exists nowhere but in yourself- and thus make yourself indispensable.” André Gide CSPs have installed Network Management Systems (NMS) to manage their active network equipment, receiving near-real-time data feeds from these devices, allowing the operator to understand their current status. This allows the company to “discover” and manage network assets […]
To all the network rectification gurus out there, the NOC operators, the fault/assurance teams, I’d like to pose a question. Do you prefer a user interface that is graphical, point and click, has drill-down capability or do you prefer a series of hot-keys so that your quick-fire key-strokes can resolve the issue faster? I personally love […]
“Innovation comes from the producer – not from the customer.” W. Edwards Deming As the head of OSS product development, what do you do when facing the following dilemma? Spend 100 man-days developing a highly customised functionality that will only suit a single existing customer or 100 man-days developing road-mapped functionality that caters for new initiatives […]
Don’t have a Traffic Engineering module in your OSS, but have performance analysis and flow-through provisioning tools? If you can carefully configure threshold events in your performance tool to trigger your provisioning tool to fire commands back into the network, then you can create your own traffic engineering.
