The OctopOSS needs innovation and evolution to become all that it can be
“Sometimes designing is very tempting; sometimes not designing is the answer. Often silence is required instead of shouting.” Karres en Brands. It’s said that when presenting a lecture, the softly spoken have more chance of reaching an audience than the classical loud extrovert. The theory goes that if a voice is barely audible, the listener […]
“You’re the example that can create light. Don’t try to talk people into the light. Be the light.” James Altucher. One of the things I love about OSS is that there are so many opportunities for improvement. Tools, techniques and models are all jumping forward in leaps and bounds but there is still so much […]
“The amount of data that enterprises are storing and managing is growing rapidly – various industry estimates indicate that data volume is doubling every 2-3 years. The rapid growth of data presents daunting challenges for IT, both in cost and performance. Although the cost of storage keeps declining, fast-growing data volumes make storage one of […]
“All the technological change in the telecoms industry is pointing towards a more final and ultimate change, the death of the old “telco” carrier model we have known for the past few decades. We have known it is coming but the last vestiges will be swept away in 2017. All telcos will finally abandon “telco” […]
OSS has a bad name in certain circles (usually for failing to deliver on time / cost / functionality or being timely / costly to enhance). Despite all those factors, the real root-cause is almost always complexity (see here for a description of the triple constraint of OSS). But it’s not just internal factors that […]
“The platform strategy has two key elements, and it is important not to confuse them. First is the platform business model, where companies build digital ecosystems or marketplaces connecting customers with producers of goods and/or services, making it easy for them to do business, rather than playing a direct role in the supply chain (think, […]
“I first came across the phrase “strong convictions, weakly held” through Marc Andreessen, but a bit of Googling showed me it was originally coined by Paul Saffo, then Director of the Palo Alto Institute for the Future. According to this post he advised his people to think this way for three reasons: •It is the […]
One of the greatest do-good opportunities for our OSS / BSS / CRM is to provide augmentation to front-line staff to enable them to have intelligent conversations, be that with customers, suppliers, colleagues, etc. Unfortunately we don’t always facilitate that to happen. In fact, the proliferation of front-line tools and processes that staff need to […]
For those of us in the technology consulting game, we think we’re pretty clever at predicting the next big technology trend. But with the proliferation of information over the Internet, it’s not that difficult to see potentially beneficial technologies coming over the horizon. We can all see network virtualisation, Internet-connected sensor networks, artificial intelligence, etc […]
Have you noticed a changing trend where some of the largest service providers in the world are reverting to building their own OSS / orchestration (ie writing software) rather than buying off-the-shelf? The trends pushing this cycle are software defined networks and agile development models. In the earliest days of OSS, the service providers made […]
…. but we’ve only just started and we haven’t even got close to figuring out how to manage it yet (from an aggregated view I mean, not just within a single vendor platform)!! This article from Peter Levine of Andreesen Horowitz predicts “The end of cloud computing.” Now I’m not so sure that this headline […]
Marc Andreessen describes platforms as “a system that can be programmed and therefore customized by outside developers — users — and in that way, adapted to countless needs and niches that the platform’s original developers could not have possibly contemplated, much less had time to accommodate.” Platform thinking is an important approach for service providers […]
This week we’ve discussed standard operating procedures, dynamic / variable operating procedures and touched on how they impact a future supply / value chain that is far more digitised and potentially has far more actors involved (eg freelance resources). The digital trust mechanisms of blockchain open up opportunities for smart contracts to change the way […]
Yesterday’s blog discussed the importance, but (perhaps) mythical concept of Standard Operating Procedures (SOP) for service providers and their OSS / BSS. The number of variants, which I can only see amplifying into the future, makes it almost futile to try to implement SOPs. I say “almost futile” because SOPs are theoretically possible if the […]
Standard Operating Procedures (SOP) have been pivotal in codifying and standardising the use cases of service providers for many years. The theory goes that if you can standardise a process, then you can produce repeatably high quality and streamline it in a cycle of continual improvement. The repeatability objective is one* of two primary recollections […]
Yesterday’s blog spoke of the challenges faced by traditional service providers to simplify their product stacks when compared with their OTT counterparts. Unlike the OTT players, removal of product lines tends to be revenue dilutitive. The other challenge facing the traditionalists is the demographics they serve compared with the OTT players. The OTT players tend […]
“We’re woefully unprepared to deal with orders of magnitude. Ten times as many orders. One-tenth the number of hospital visits. Ten times the traffic. One-tenth the revenue. Ten times as fast. Because dramatic shifts rarely happen, we bracket everything on the increment, preparing for just a relatively small change here or there. We think we’re […]
In earlier blogs, we’ve referenced this great article on SingularityHub to show how the exponentiality of technological progress tends to surprise us as change initially creeps up on us, then overwhelms us in situations like this: But what if we changed the “exponential growth surprise factor” in the diagram above to “opportunity cost?” Further to […]
“Planning is useless but planning is invaluable. Predictions are useless but invaluable.” Scott Galloway. The world of OSS, if it’s even called that anymore, is in a rapid state of change. Business models, delivery models, network topologies, IT platforms, test methodologies and more are creating impacts that are changing our industries and that’s not even […]
Yesterday’s blog discussed the fact that many of the KPIs gathered and used by OSS / BSS could potentially conflict with other KPIs, even when used within a single organisation. It then posed a question: “Have you ever seen an organisation define a simplification metric as one of their highest-profile KPIs?” One of the biggest […]
