Minimise the tentacles on the OctopOSS. Keep it simple
In 1998 Berkshire Hathaway acquired a reinsurance company called General Re. “The only significant staff change that followed the merger was the elimination of General Re’s investment unit. Some 150 people had been in charge of deciding where to invest the company’s funds; they were replaced with just one individual – Warren Buffett.” Robert G. […]
I’d like to get your opinion on this question – are OSS business tools or technical tools? We can say that BSS are as the name implies – business support systems. We can say that NMS / EMS / NEMS are network management tools – technical tools. The OSS layer fits between those two layers […]
On Friday, we talked about how making compromises on OSS can actually be a method for reducing risk. We used the OSS vendor selection process to discuss the point, where many stakeholders contribute to the list of requirements that help to select the best-fit product for the organisation. To continue with this same theme, I’d […]
As an implementer of OSS, what’s the single factor that makes it challenging for us to deliver on any of the three constraints of project delivery? Complexity. Or put another way, variants. The more variants, the less chance we have of delivering on time, cost or functionality. So let me ask you, is our next […]
You all know I’m a fan of training operators in OSS sandpits (and as apprenticeships during the build phase) rather than a week or two of classroom training at the end of a project. To reduce the re-work in building a sandpit environment, which will probably be a dev/test environment rather than a production environment, […]
Have you noticed that OSS projects need to go through extensive review to get funding of business cases? That makes sense. They tend to be a big investment after all. Many OSS projects fail, so we want to make sure this one doesn’t and we perform thorough planing / due-diligence. But I do find it […]
We all know that once installed, OSS tend to stay in place for many years. Too much effort to air-lift in. Too much effort to air-lift back out, especially if tightly integrated over time. The monolithic COTS (off-the-shelf) tools of the past would generally be commissioned and customised during the initial implementation project, with occasional […]
If I start talking about doomsday scenarios where the global OSS job industry is decimated, most people will immediately jump to the conclusion that I’m predicting an artificial intelligence (AI) takeover. AI could have a role to play, but is not a key facet of the scenario I’m most worried about. You’d think that OSS […]
Since the soccer World Cup is currently taking place in Russia, I thought I’d include reference to the MoSCoW technique in today’s blog. It could be used as part of your vendor selection processes for the purpose of OSS requirement prioritisation. “The term MoSCoW itself is an acronym derived from the first letter of each […]
“The dartboard, by contrast, is not remotely logical, but is somehow brilliant. The 20 sector sits between the dismal scores of five and one. Most players aim for the triple-20, because that’s what professionals do. However, for all but the best darts players, this is a mistake. If you are not very good at darts, […]
It’s an interesting season as we come up to the EOFY (end of financial year – on 30 June). Budget cycles are coming to an end. At organisations that don’t carry un-spent budgets into the next financial year, the looming EOFY triggers a use-it-or-lose-it mindset. In some cases, organisations are almost forced to allocate funds […]
“For more than a century, economies of scale made the corporation an ideal engine of business. But now, a flurry of important new technologies, accelerated by artificial intelligence (AI), is turning economies of scale inside out. Business in the century ahead will be driven by economies of unscale, in which the traditional competitive advantages of […]
“Many systems are moving beyond simple virtualization and are being run on dynamic private or even public clouds. CSPs will migrate many to hybrid clouds because of concerns about data security and regulations on where data are stored and processed. We believe that over the next 15 years, nearly all software systems will migrate to […]
“In 1972, the Club of Rome in its report The Limits to Growth predicted a steadily increasing demand for material as both economies and populations grew. The report predicted that continually increasing resource demand would eventually lead to an abrupt economic collapse. Studies on material use and economic growth show instead that society is gaining […]
“Skills multiply labors by two, five, 10, 50, 100 times. You can chop a tree down with a hammer, but it takes about 30 days. That’s called labor. But if you trade the hammer in for an ax, you can chop the tree down in about 30 minutes. What’s the difference in 30 days and […]
You’re probably familiar with strangler figs, which grow on a host tree, often resulting in the eventual death of the host. You’re probably less familiar with the strangler fig analogy as an OSS transformation or cutover model. The concept is that there is a “host tree” (ie legacy system) that needs to be obsoleted and […]
I recently had something of a perspective-flip moment in relation to automation within the realm of OSS. In the past, I’ve tended to tackle the automation challenge from the perspective of applying automated / scripted responses to tasks that are done manually via the OSS. But it’s dawned on me that I have it around […]
This is the third in a series describing the process of finding the right OSS solution for your specific needs and getting estimated pricing to help you build a business case. The first post described the overall OSS selection process we use. The second described the way we poll the market and prepare a short-list […]
In yesterday’s post, we talked about how to estimate OSS pricing. One of the key pillars of the approach was to first identify a short-list of vendors / integrators best-suited to implementing your specific OSS, then working closely with them to construct a pricing model. Finding the right vendor / integrator can be a complex […]
For network operators, our OSS and BSS touch most parts of the business. The network, and the services they carry, are core business so a majority of business units will be contributing to that core business. As such, our OSS and BSS provide many of the metrics used by those business units. This is a […]
