The OctopOSS needs innovation and evolution to become all that it can be
“What do you think the difference is between having 2 reasons to achieve a goal and having 100 reasons? When you have 100 reasons, reaching a goal is pretty much a certainty.” Ron Whitaker in this interesting blog that recounts an urban legend study about goal setting. Ron’s blog also provides a downloadable worksheet for […]
“I used to say of him (Napoleon) that his presence on the field made the difference of 40,000 men.” Duke of Wellington. If you really want to learn about your OSS deeply, you have to get out into the battlefield – at the customer site, with the OSS operators, with the developers, with the innovators […]
“Resilience is accepting your new reality, even if it’s less good than the one you had before. You can fight it, you can do nothing but scream about what you’ve lost, or you can accept that and try to put together something that’s good.” Elizabeth Edwards. Many leading OSS products have been built around concepts […]
“I consider each business investment based on concept and revenue.” Daymond John. Many CSPs are in an era of reducing revenues as their historic cash-cows such as voice calls (especially STD and IDD calls), text messages and data are becoming increasingly commoditised or replaced by Over The Top (OTT) service offerings. They’re also scrambling to […]
“Companies can get too big. There is such a thing as diseconomies of scale, which occurs when companies get less efficient after reaching a certain size.” Chris Mayer In the agrarian age, a vendor typically had a small, local, loyal tribe. In the industrial age, “factories” dominated creating vastly more product more efficiently and was […]
“Commitment and talent are unconnected unless you connect them” John C. Maxwell. OSS live and die on the quality of the connections you are able to make with them. Commitment and talent are but one of many. There are so many others including: Performance and maintenance; Process and life-cycle; Outages and spares; Resolutions and knowledge […]
“Part of the challenge of being an entrepreneur, if you’re going for a really huge opportunity, is trying to find problems that aren’t quite on the radar yet and try to solve those.” Sean Parker One of my favourite vendor selection and requirements gathering stories relates to a tender that was run by the Air […]
“We’re just going to have more and more traffic, and more and more congestion. Regardless of whether we decide to go forward with these projects or not, one way or the other, we will pay.” Jacob Snow Okay, so your OSS/BSS can’t really protect you from getting the flu, but perhaps it can ease congestion […]
“Your most unhappy customers are your greatest source of learning.” Bill Gates. I’d extend this one step further in the world of OSS and look to learn from your competitors’s most unhappy customers. Chances are that they’re making the same mistakes as discussed in this Toyota Five-Whys Analysis of OSS. It’s better to learn from the […]
“I love when things are transparent, free and clear of all inhibition and judgement.” Pharrell Williams. Free fields are often your get out of jail free cards when modelling data in an OSS. They allow you to create the linking keys between domains that would not otherwise exist, where relationships could otherwise not exist. For […]
“Employers need to start rethinking their recruiting process, notably in using sophisticated social network search tools to go spear-fishing for high potential talent, rather than waiting for applications to come across the transom. And, managers need to look for the skills that really matter today in high potential young talent, attributes like cognitive load capacity, […]
“We can change skill levels through training, but we can’t change attitude.” Herb Kelleher. Dan Schwabel on Forbes.com asks “Are technical and soft skills less important than attitude?” When it comes to OSS, technical skills are important because there are so many technology elements involved. Technical geniuses are essential for delivering remarkable products and solutions. […]
“To create cool ideas you have to hang around cool people. Magicians and madmen inspire creative thought not pencil-pushers and bean-counters.” Don The Idea Guy Snyder in his 100 Whats of Creativity My first OSS project had more “characters” (Magicians and Madmen perhaps?) than all other projects in my 15+ year career combined. Reunions with […]
“Professional sports is a business.” Lynn Swann The above is true, but is there also a lot that business can learn from professional sports? With most professional sports, there is a clear goal for every team, the championship at the end of each season. This defines the vision that all players and coaches are working […]
“Most consultants tend to read voraciously, seeking new ideas and insights as they emerge around the world. Because of the many dimensions of the problems we address, it is important to read both broadly and deeply.” Pamela McNamara OSS technologies and techniques are constantly evolving so OSS consultants and integrators have to allocate time towards […]
In the State of the Asian CXO Survey 2012 by T.C Seow, there has been a clearly identified increase in corporate culture being an inhibitor of innovation. Seow speculates “that there is now conflict between senior management and the younger, so-called Generation Y executives or millennials who do not see eye-to-eye with their bosses. Perhaps there […]
“This new economy has three distinguishing characteristics: It is global. It favors intangible things—ideas, information, and relationships. And it is intensely interlinked. These three attributes produce a new type of marketplace and society, one that is rooted in ubiquitous electronic networks.” Kevin Kelly in “New Rules for the New Economy” Kevin Kelly’s three distinguishing characteristics […]
“It is better to have enough ideas for some of them to be wrong, than to be always right by having no ideas at all.” Edward De Bono OctopOSS are complex beasts so it’s very easy to dig out a negative viewpoint, focussing on the difficulties, the failures, the problems or the reasons it won’t […]
“Introverts treasure the close relationships they have stretched so much to make.” Adam S. McHugh Stay inside your box and you will get forever stuck inside that little box. Instead get out of your box, bring others to you and help connect others. OSS are all about connections. If you stay inside the box that […]
“When you hear buzz around the beehive, you know they’re making honey in there.” Terrence Howard In an earlier post we talked about gesture computing and how it might be used to manage the networks and control the OSS of the future, so the possibilities presented by the MYO from Thalmic Labs, seen here, appears to be […]
