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
OSS tend to be very technical and transactional in nature. For example, a critical alarm happens, so we have to coordinate remedial actions as soon as possible. Or, a new customer has requested service so we have to coordinate the workforce to implement certain tasks in the physical and logical/virtual world. When you spend so […]
Yesterday’s post discussed two waves of decisions stemming from our increasing obsession with data collection. “…the first wave had [arisen] because we’d almost all prefer to make data-driven decisions (ie decisions based on “proof”) rather than “gut-feel” decisions. We’re increasingly seeing a second wave come through – to use data not just to identify trends […]
Data collection and data science is becoming big business. Not just in telco – our OSS have always been one of the biggest data gatherers around – but across all sectors that are increasingly digitising (should I just say, “all sectors” because they’re all digitising?). Why do you think we’re so keen to collect so […]
Geoff Moore’s seminal book, “Crossing the Chasm,” described the psychological chasm between early buyers and the mainstream market. Seth Godin cites Moore’s work, “Moore’s Crossing the Chasm helped marketers see that while innovation was the tool to reach the small group of early adopters and opinion leaders, it was insufficient to reach the masses. Because […]
A few years ago I was lucky enough to be invited to lead a bid. I say lucky because the partner organisations are two of the most iconic firms in the tech industry. The bid was for bleeding-edge work, potentially worth well over a billion dollars. I was a little surprised to be honest. I […]
In a post last week we posed the question on whether Inventory Management still retains relevance. A friend recently posited that inventory tools are no longer relevant. I see where he’s coming from but also tend to disagree (but with an open mind). IMHO There are certainly uses cases where inventory remains unquestionably needed. […]
“When experts are wrong, it’s often because they’re experts on an earlier version of the world.” Paul Graham. OSS experts are often wrong. Not only because of the “earlier version of the world” paradigm mentioned above, but also the “parallel worlds” paradigm that’s not explicitly mentioned. That is, they may be experts on one […]
OSS wear many hats and help many different functions within an organisation. One function that OSS assists might be surprising to some people – the CFO / Accounting function. The traditional service provider business model tends to be CAPEX-heavy, with significant investment required on physical infrastructure. Since assets need to be depreciated and life-cycle managed, […]
I don’t know about you, but I find this industry of ours has a remarkable ability to keep us humble. Barely a day goes by when I don’t have to slap my forehead and say, “uhhh…. of course!” (or perhaps, “D’oh!!”) I had one such instance yesterday. I couldn’t figure out why a client’s telemetry […]
The following is a set of user stories I’ve provided to TM Forum to help with their current Autonomous Networking initiative. They’re just an initial discussion point for others to riff off. We’d love to get your comments, additions and recommended refinements too. As a Head of Network Operations, I want to Automatically maintain the […]
At Passionate About OSS, we’re lucky enough to count the utilities market as an important part of our client base. This probably puts us in a very small percentage of OSS exponents that work across OSS for telco and utilities. Utilities have a number of interesting and unique nuances compared with other OSS markets. Starting […]
You’ve all probably seen this scene from the Tom Hanks movie, Apollo 13 right? But you’re probably wondering what it has to do with OSS? Well, this scene came to mind when I was preparing a list of user stories required to facilitate Autonomous Networking. More specifically, to the use-case where we want the Autonomous […]
I must’ve written dozens of posts about us needing to collectively invest a lot more effort into UI / UX. I’ve written quite a few over the last few months especially. This one in particular springs to mind. As an industry, we typically don’t do user experience journeys (UX) or user interfaces (UI) very well […]
A slightly left-field thought dawned on me the other day and I’d like to hear your thoughts on it. We all know that almost all telemetry coming out of our networks is time-stamped. Events, syslogs, metrics, etc. That makes perfect sense because we look for time-based ripple-out effects when trying to diagnose issues. But therefore […]
….I want to make my network so observable, reliable, predictable and repeatable that I don’t need anyone to operate it. That’s clearly a highly ambitious goal. Probably even unachievable if we say it doesn’t need anyone to run it. But I wonder whether this has to be the starting point we take on behalf of […]
“For those starting out in product, here’s a tip: Design, Defaults*, Documentation, Details and Delivery really matter in software.”Jeetu Patel here. * Note that you can interpret “Defaults” to be Out-Of-The-Box functionality offered by the product. Let’s break those 5 D-words down and describe why they really matter to the OSS industry shall we? Design […]
I’m currently reading a book entitled, “Jony Ive. The genius behind Apple’s greatest products.” I’d like to share a paragraph with you from it (and probably expect a few more in coming days): “…Apple’s internal culture heavily favored the engineers within the product groups. The design process was engineering driven. In the early days of […]
When I first started the Passionate About OSS site / blog many years ago, I was lucky to get a handful of views per day. It’s grown by many multiples since then, fortunately. The launch of The Blue Book OSS/BSS Vendor Directory generated some exciting metrics yesterday. The directory alone came within 5 pageviews of […]
“From watching ESPN, I’d learned about the power of information bombardment. ESPN strafes its viewers with an almost hysterical amount of data and details. Scrolling boxes. Panels. Bars. Graphics. Multi-angle camera perspectives. When exposed to a surfeit of data, men tend to feel more masculine and in command. Do most men bother to decipher these […]
We’re going to look into assurance models of the past versus the changing assurance demands that are appearing these days. The diagrams below are highly stylised for discussion purposes so they’re unlikely to reflect actual implementations, but we’ll get to that. Under the old model, the heart of the OSS/BSS was the database (almost exclusively […]
