Minimise the tentacles on the OctopOSS. Keep it simple
“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 […]
In the past we’ve posed the concept of using a search front-end as a user friendly interface to the OSS of the future. This UI would have the ability to poll all of the disparate systems that make up an OSS / BSS stack and curate responses. The front-end would need to be smart, but […]
In the last couple of days, we’ve discussed frameworks that could allow CSPs to design disruptive business models around factors that our OSS / BSS can control. Not exactly riveting stuff for the tech-heads amongst the reader-base, but relevant for the amount of investment that gets directed into the tech projects that we all work […]
The diagram below shows the six phases in a customer life-cycle as defined by Forrester Research: It also represents a map of the omni-channel experience for customers and approximates hand-off points. As far as the customer is concerned, the experience should be a seamless continual loop regardless of whether they engage via retail outlet, online, contact […]
“Information overload is happening at all career levels. Companies restructure, and current staff absorb additional responsibilities, requiring new skills to be learned. Technology changes, and new systems, tools and processes need to be mastered. Markets change, and new strategies or client prospects or industry sectors need to be researched. To be successful in today’s times […]
Singapore has made some really innovative decisions over the years. Recent ones include tokenisation of the Singapore Dollar on cyber-currencies, investing heavily in international startups based in Singapore and the streamlining of identity management (which will undoubtedly help to get around one of the biggest blockers to self-on-boarding new customers onto comms networks, particularly mobile). […]
“It’s quite common, especially in enterprise technology, for something to propose a new way to solve an existing problem. It can’t be used to solve the problem in the old way, so ‘it doesn’t work’, and proposes a new way, and so ‘no-one will want that’. This is how generational shifts work – first you […]
“Mike Flint was Warren Buffett’s personal airplane pilot for 10 years. (Flint has also flown four US Presidents, so I think we can safely say he is good at his job.) According to Flint, he was talking about his career priorities with Buffett when his boss asked the pilot to go through a 3-step exercise. […]
“I should say… that in the real world exponential curves don’t continue for ever. We get S-curves which closely mimic exponential curves in the beginning, but then tail off after a while often as new technologies hit physical limits which prevent further progress. What seems to happen in practice is that some new technology emerges […]
“Most customers buy the basic and learn to love the features, but the whole customer experience is based on trying to sell the features.” Roger Gibson. This statement appears oh-so-true in the OSS sales pitches that I’ve observed. In many cases the customer really only needs the basic, but when every vendor is selling the […]
“Applying the Second Law of Thermodynamics to understanding reality, Boyd infers that individuals or organizations that don’t communicate with the outside world by getting new information about the environment or by creating new mental models act like a “closed system.” And just as a closed system in nature will have increasing entropy, or disorder, so […]
“Many of you here are working on digitalisation projects but I would urge you to think bigger. You need to think about business model change – with existing customers or into whole new sectors. It isn’t just about product innovation. It’s about company innovation.” Deborah Sherry at TM Forum Live! I really like the way […]
