OSS consultants provide you with the opportunity to bring a different set of ideas, insights and connections to your OctopOSS
“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 […]
“McDonald’s hit a peak moment of productivity by getting to a mythical scale, with a limited menu and little in they way of customization. They could deliver a burger for a fraction of what it might take a diner to do it on demand. McDonald’s now challenges the idea that custom has to cost more, […]
Have you noticed that TM Forum’s eTOM seems to be used in common vernacular when people talk about mapping and/or comparing products. eTOM and TAM are both quite closely linked (you’ll notice the similarities in colour-banding between the two). However, eTOM is more of a standardized mapping of workflows, whereas TAM is more of a mapping of […]
A couple of facts about the OSS market that you’ve probably already noticed – It’s highly fragmented and the selling cycle tends to average 12-18 months. This means that cost of sales and cost of acquisition are a source of frustration for each side of the equation. Over the years, I’ve been privileged to have regularly […]
As you’ve all noticed, “cost-out” is one of the biggest justification techniques used in the OSS industry. The theory is that if you can automate activities, then you can reduce head-count from the operations team, thus reducing costs. While I’m happy to help customers build business cases around this perspective, I have a slight divergence […]
I’ve recently been doing quite a bit of work (and hypothesizing) on journey mapping for customers of telco services. I had been conceptualising the journeys starting from channels such as a retail outlet (eg O2A – order to activate), from an online store (eg U2C – usage to cash), from an IVR (eg T2R – […]
Design Thinking appears to be “the great differentiator” for many consulting firms at the moment (the only problem is if everyone is using it as a differentiator, then is it really a differentiator?). Having said that, the principles of Design Thinking do highlight a couple of important steps that I’ve found to be lacking in […]
Yesterday’s blog covered how exponential growth in ICT industries has been (and will continue to be) a challenge for all of us in OSS-land. We’ve already seen some fundamental changes in OSS in recent years to be able to cope with the massive growth in device counts, bandwidth demands, etc. We’ve seen hyper-scaled hardware/software platforms […]
We’ve all heard of Moore’s Law, which predicts the semiconductor industry’s ability to exponentially increase transistor density in an integrated circuit. “Moore’s prediction proved accurate for several decades, and has been used in the semiconductor industry to guide long-term planning and to set targets for research and development. Advancements in digital electronics are strongly linked to […]
One of the interesting parts of starting a new OSS project or new customer is figuring out their mode of operation. For example, some architects want high-level requirements to design their own solution against. Others want you to document the requirements so tightly that you’re effectively designing the solution for them (eg field mappings, data […]
“Don’t build where they are. Build where they’re going to be.” Sam Walton. Sounds like a persuasive argument and not dissimilar to Wayne Gretzky’s famous quote about skating to where the ice hockey puck is going to be. Sam Walton had plenty of proof to back up this claim (as did Gretzky). Walton was after […]
I’m currently working on an assignment that is slightly left-field for the typical OSS consultant, but is giving me a different angle on OSS than I’ve had before. I’m working on a predominantly IVR-based project, but considers journeys through multiple customer contact channels. In theory, it has nothing to do with OSS, but I’m finding […]
“Global telecommunications study: navigating the road to 2020” It’s interesting that “Improved IT Systems and Processes” is seen as a strategic priority by around a third of respondents to this executive study by EY. It also implies that improved IT systems and processes are probably only front-of-mind for investment for about one third of Telco […]
Early in my (pre-OSS) career I noticed that I had a different approach to designing solutions than most of my colleagues. My colleagues, when given an assignment, would tend to disappear into their office cubicles and prepare a solution in isolation, before asking for a review (for quality assurance purposes) once their solution was all […]
Over the years I’ve seen many OSS presentations, often in the role of helping a customer make a decision on which OSS option to proceed with. There have been some good presentations and others that didn’t go so well. I’ve even seen the best-fit products dropped out before short-listing because presentations were structured so poorly […]
One of the biggest challenges for an OSS team is finding (and keeping) resources that know the industry, know their technologies and know why / how their OSS helps their customers (ie tripods). One approach is to get battle-hardened OSS resources from outside, put them into senior positions, and build teams around them. This approach […]
In yesterday’s post, we discussed how building a story around the resolution of customer problems is a way to attract customers to your solution, yet few in the OSS industry seem to go about it this way. To build this story though, you have to understand your customers. For example: What functionality of yours do […]
“For the person trying to do everything alone, the game really is over. If you want to do something big, you must link up with others. One is too small a number to achieve greatness. That’s the Law of Significance.” John C Maxwell. In the past, national telcos have been able to achieve greatness alone […]
The diagram below shows what is known as The Whale Curve. It shows a graph of the relative profitability of each product in your product mix. From the book, “Waging War on Complexity Costs,” by Steven A Wilson and Andrei Perumal. You might be wondering how a profitability graph could ever peak at over 100%. […]
I was recently asked how I would go about building up an OSS from scratch. To be honest, I didn’t do a great job of explaining it at the time despite having done it at four tier-1 carriers in the past. Well, not exactly from scratch, as each of these carriers had operated from NMS […]
