Minimise the tentacles on the OctopOSS. Keep it simple
“More people will pay you money to help them achieve a monetary goal than will pay you to give them something pretty to look at.” Web Teacher In recent posts we’ve explored OSS user interfaces and simpler interfaces in particular. But a pretty interface is only useful if helps a prospective client achieve a monetary […]
“Whitespace, many times referred to as negative space, is the portion of a page left unmarked, the portion that is left blank, or the empty space in a page. In web design terms, it’s the space between graphics, columns, images, text, margins and other elements. It is the space left untouched in order to smooth […]
“The utter complexity of huge, standardized software systems also explains the death of big software. Enormous whole-company projects are often beyond the capabilities of even the most experienced project and program managers – especially when there’s never 100% consensus about the need for such a draconian project in the first place. The cloud has also […]
“Humans can speak 150 vs. type 40 words per minute, on average..” Kleiner Perkins’ Internet Trends 2016. The latest Mary Meeker report (ie the link above) provides some interesting insights, as usual. One of them is the reference to voice becoming a much more significant computing interaction mechanism – evolving from keyboards to microphones and […]
Last week we ran a series of blogs about what the OSS of the future is going to look like. It’s going to be simple, not cluttered. It’s going to provide answers, not just reams of information. It’s going to allow operators to throw questions at it, in natural speech. It may even provide you […]
Just thinking about yesterday’s blog (about how OSS will become Whole of Business Support Systems and what impact that will have on the UI) when something quite simple dawned on me… In most cases, OSS should be designed to provide answers, not just information. But in most cases today, the opposite is true. We have […]
In yesterday’s blog, we discussed how the OSS of the future will not just be Operational support systems, instead being Whole of Business support systems (WOBSS?? :)). Anyway, we also discussed that to be relevant to the whole of business, our tools will need to provide: A context that is relevant to the operator (who […]
“So if an OSS is the glue that allows a modern digital business to communicate, derive cross-department insights and deliver operational efficiencies, does having the “Operational” in OSS actually constrain our thinking into what our tools can actually be… MUST actually be?” Friday’s PAOSS post. So if the statement above is true, and we are […]
“Smart contracts are computer protocols that facilitate, verify, or enforce the negotiation or performance of a contract, or that make a contractual clause unnecessary. Smart contracts usually also have a user interface and often emulate the logic of contractual clauses. Proponents of smart contracts claim that many kinds of contractual clauses may thus be made […]
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 […]
“Competence: If you build it, they will come.” John C Maxwell. Interesting concept that. There’s another saying… “Know you, like you, trust you.” [actually it’s, “All things being equal, people will do business with — and refer business to— those people they know, like and trust,” by Bob Burg, but I simplify it]. You may […]
There’s a constant dilemma underway for those pondering OSS: Do we try to gather every conceivable piece of data that we can and put up with the costs, time and effort to do so Or do we keep just the Minimum Viable Data (MVD), minimising curation, but missing out on the details that might drive […]
“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%. […]
“…the program “The Brain,” in which Dr David Eagleman, neuroscientist, NYT bestselling author and Guggenheim Fellow shared a fascinating but little known secret…our brains are specifically designed so that we learn on the job – by doing. Dr Eagleman explained that this is why human babies do not have anywhere near the survival skills possessed […]
“For many, the idea of self-service business intelligence, where IT opens up a small menu of capabilities for employees, has not yet produced its promised benefits despite having been around for a few years. It is clearly an improvement on the traditional, IT-run report factory, but it is still too limiting to satisfy people’s ever-growing […]
“This sounds like a joke now – “there was a website that listed every single website that there was”. Yahoo actually worked pretty well when there were 20,000 websites, just as a book shop with 20,000 titles works pretty well. But the Yahoo directory peaked at 3.2m sites and at that that point it definitely […]
“Hands up if you have ever been bitten by an elephant? Now hands up if you have ever been bitten by a mosquito? See, it’s the little things in life that will get you” Joel Weldon paraphrased.” Put another way, “the devil is in the details.” This mindset has always perplexed me, particularly in the […]
“I have been harping on for years – many years – that the terms BSS and OSS are defunct and should be replaced with something far more generic like MMB: Money Making Bits. You may laugh, but BSS (business support systems) and OSS (operational support systems) are leftovers from a bygone era when communications service […]
“With everything going towards continuous delivery, ironic how you don’t see any unit test apparatus in the products. Even the new stuff. Asking for a Unit test harness is like asking for an Audi engine in a Chevy truck.” Douglas Stevenson. Great call-out here from Dougie in a comment about why Network Engineers don’t trust […]
