Minimise the tentacles on the OctopOSS. Keep it simple
“Here are a few questions I reflect on: – Am I excited to be doing what I’m doing or am I in aimless motion? – Are the trade-offs between work and my relationships well-balanced? – How can I speed up the process from where I am to where I want to go? – What big […]
“When in doubt, connect. That’s what fast-growing, important organizations do. Making stuff is great. Making connections is even better.” Seth Godin in his post here. Simple words. Simple concept. Interesting message…. with a traffic-light of OSS layers. Layer 1 – A connection red light The more connections an OSS has, the more enriched the data […]
There’s an interesting thing with off-the-shelf OSS solutions that are subsequently highly customised by the buyer. I call it the trickle-down effect. By nature, commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) solutions tend to be designed to cope with as many variants as their designers can imagine. They’re designed to be inclusive in nature. But customised COTS solutions tend to […]
Reports are an important interaction type into any OSS, obviously. What’s less well observed is the time (ie cost) it can take to create and curate canned reports. [BTW in my crude terminology, Canned Reports are ones where the report format and associated query is created / coded and designed to be run more than […]
When planning out a full-stack business / network / services management solution, I tend to follow the top-down, bottom-up design process. Let’s take the TMN pyramid as a starting point: Image courtesy of www.researchgate.net Bottom-up: When designing the assurance stream (eg alarms, performance, etc), I start at the bottom (Network Elements), understanding what devices exist […]
“The Mechanical Turk… was a fake chess-playing machine constructed in the late 18th century. From 1770 until its destruction by fire in 1854 it was exhibited by various owners as an automaton, though it was eventually revealed to be an elaborate hoax. The Turk was in fact a mechanical illusion that allowed a human chess […]
“If [more] information was the answer, then we’d all be billionaires with perfect abs.” Derek Sivers. The sharing economy has made a deluge of information available to us at negligible cost. We have more information available at our fingertips than we can ever consume and process. So why don’t we all have massive bank balances […]
OSS can be complicated beasts with many tentacles. It can make starting a new project daunting. When I start, I like to use a WBS to show all the tentacles (people, processes, technology, contracts) on a single page, then look for the lead domino (or dominoes). A lead domino is the first piece, the one […]
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. […]
During the last week, this blog-roll has talked about the benefits, but also the challenges facing implementation techniques like Agile in the world of OSS. There’s no doubt that they’re good at breaking down challenges into smaller pieces for implementation. Unfortunately there’s also the risk of doing for the sake of doing – stuffing more […]
What does the integration map of your OSS suite look like? Does it have lots of meatballs with a spaghetti of interconnections? Is it possibly even too entangled that even creating an integration map would be a nightmare? Similarly, how many customisations have you made to your out-of-the-box tools? In recent posts we’ve discussed the […]
“Are we spawning a maelstrom, the butterfly effect from all of our doing?” Yesterday’s post pondered the question of whether we’re getting entangled in our frenzy for doing. I’ve been privileged to have worked in a dozen countries or more and even more privileged to be an Australian. Less proud am I though of the […]
“At least DO SOMETHING! DO! Don’t think, don’t hope, do! At least you can come off and say ‘I did this, I shepherded, I played on. At least I did something” John Kennedy. The following clip shows some of Australian Rules Football’s finest motivators, including a snippet of the speech from John Kennedy as quoted […]
“People pay for two things: Results: You do something they couldn’t do for themselves. Convenience: You do something they don’t want to do for themselves, or you make something difficult easier to do.” Ramit Sethi. I really like the way Ramit has broken down an infinite number of variants down to just two key categories. […]
“While we were talking about this permanent shop, which he still hadn’t opened, his attention would often drift to his next shop. And the one after that. And after that. And then building an app to make online ordering easy. And then, becoming the next Starbucks. Whoa. Hold on, man, I told him. I get […]
Gordon Ramsay used to run a TV show called Hell’s Kitchen where he would take a failing restaurant and would attempt to transform it one expletive at a time. I’m not remotely interested in reality kitchen shows but I did watch a couple of episodes of this one. Enough to notice a trend happening. He […]
“I’ve been involved in telecom operations for decades, and I’ve learned that there is nothing in networking as inertial as OSS/BSS. A large minority of my experts (but still a minority) think that we should scrap the whole OSS/BSS model and simply integrate operations tasks with the service models of SDN and NFV orchestration. That’s […]
CSPs globally are trying to be innovative, and being heavily involved in tech since their earliest days, always perceive themselves to be innovative to their core (yes, bad pun). There’s no doubt that there is a lot of innovation happening in large CSPs, but I wonder how much of it is really attributable to the […]
Voice and data are no longer the services that organisations, large and small, see as making a difference. The services that do make a difference are more dynamic and diverse – digital distribution, promotion and marketing, payments and billing, business intelligence, business continuity (including security) and more – the factors that make their organisations thrive. […]
I’ve noticed the term “tech debt” entering the OSS vernacular to represent stuff that is built now as a short-term workaround before the long-term solution comes online. But what if it’s ALL tech-debt? Everything we build needs to be supported for its natural life. The more we accumulate, the more that needs supporting. Support represents […]
