Minimise the tentacles on the OctopOSS. Keep it simple
OSS has a bad name in certain circles (usually for failing to deliver on time / cost / functionality or being timely / costly to enhance). Despite all those factors, the real root-cause is almost always complexity (see here for a description of the triple constraint of OSS). But it’s not just internal factors that […]
One of the greatest do-good opportunities for our OSS / BSS / CRM is to provide augmentation to front-line staff to enable them to have intelligent conversations, be that with customers, suppliers, colleagues, etc. Unfortunately we don’t always facilitate that to happen. In fact, the proliferation of front-line tools and processes that staff need to […]
No, not “Wow!” the exclamation but the acronym W-O-W. Wow stands for Walk Out Working. In other words, if a customer comes into a retail store, they walk out with a working service rather than exasperation. Whilst many customers wouldn’t be aware of it, there are lots of things that have to happen in an […]
Have you noticed a changing trend where some of the largest service providers in the world are reverting to building their own OSS / orchestration (ie writing software) rather than buying off-the-shelf? The trends pushing this cycle are software defined networks and agile development models. In the earliest days of OSS, the service providers made […]
The first step of simplification (exiting legacy), be it systems, processes, products, is to know who/what is still using the old thing. Are the users internal (eg admins), external (eg customers) or are the transactions M2M (machine-to-machine)? If M2M, which machines and what are the transactions? This information becomes important for change management (eg transition […]
This week we’ve discussed standard operating procedures, dynamic / variable operating procedures and touched on how they impact a future supply / value chain that is far more digitised and potentially has far more actors involved (eg freelance resources). The digital trust mechanisms of blockchain open up opportunities for smart contracts to change the way […]
Yesterday’s blog discussed the importance, but (perhaps) mythical concept of Standard Operating Procedures (SOP) for service providers and their OSS / BSS. The number of variants, which I can only see amplifying into the future, makes it almost futile to try to implement SOPs. I say “almost futile” because SOPs are theoretically possible if the […]
Standard Operating Procedures (SOP) have been pivotal in codifying and standardising the use cases of service providers for many years. The theory goes that if you can standardise a process, then you can produce repeatably high quality and streamline it in a cycle of continual improvement. The repeatability objective is one* of two primary recollections […]
In two recent posts, we’ve discussed the changing world order of OSS with NFV as a catalyst, and highlighted the challenges posed by maintaining legacy product offerings (the pyramid of OSS pain). These two paradigms (and others such as the touchpoint explosion) are dragging traditional service providers closer to a significant crossroad. Network virtualisation will […]
The diagram below is a crass over-simplification of where the source of OSS pain (ie complexity) tends to originate from. If an organisation has complexity in the upper-most layer (ie products), then this is bound to flow downstream, amplifying along the way and culminating in increased complexity at support systems like OSS/BSS. If there are […]
One of the things that I’ve noticed when organisations are looking to select a new OSS is that there is a tendency to focus on the functionality. That’s one way and it can be a successful way of identifying the requirements that you need to benchmark against. I’ve also helped organisations with their vendor selection […]
“Planning is useless but planning is invaluable. Predictions are useless but invaluable.” Scott Galloway. The world of OSS, if it’s even called that anymore, is in a rapid state of change. Business models, delivery models, network topologies, IT platforms, test methodologies and more are creating impacts that are changing our industries and that’s not even […]
Yesterday’s blog spoke of building an ultra-cut-down version of OSS products to get them in and working quickly. That blog leads into an interesting concept being used in the Agile world, Weighted Shortest Job First (WSJF) [Hat tip to Scott for bringing this to my attention]. “WSJF is a scheduling algorithm (or if you prefer, […]
The OSS market has two ends of a continuum – one end consisting of what I refer to as “the self-service customer” (ie highly repeatable) and the other being “the requirement of one customer,” (ie highly customised). Naturally there are contracts that fall on the continuum between these two extremes too. The self-service end of […]
Yesterday’s blog discussed the fact that many of the KPIs gathered and used by OSS / BSS could potentially conflict with other KPIs, even when used within a single organisation. It then posed a question: “Have you ever seen an organisation define a simplification metric as one of their highest-profile KPIs?” One of the biggest […]
Anyone involved with OSS will know that it is a DBA (Death By Acronym) experience. We have so many acronyms to deal with, some known globally, others only with relevance to a specific organization. One of the most common acronyms is the KPI (Key Performance Indicators). What’s scary is that the KPI is a catch-all […]
“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 […]
Analytics is a term that has caught fire in IT relatively recently. In many ways, our OSS have been doing “analytics” for years, albeit not necessarily with the same tools at their disposal. If we simplify the term down to the use case of “being able to ask questions of a massive data store” then […]
“So, I asked myself, why? Why aren’t businesses taking the opportunity to digitize and improve at the same time? The answer I suspect is because many digitizing programmes sit on a hot-bed of over-engineering. Oftentimes this means adopting”strategic” business platforms which require companies to adapt their processes to fit them rather than the other way […]
