Minimise the tentacles on the OctopOSS. Keep it simple
“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 […]
In yesterday’s post we discussed how Virtual Reality (VR) can be utilised in OSS. Today we look at how OSS and Augmented Reality (AR) to be further augmented with decision support systems to help OSS operators. As a starting point for this exercise, we have to think about what OSS situations have a spatial reality […]
One of the many features of OSS is that they’re great at monitoring network performance and alerting operators of any threshold breaches. Initially these thresholds were static. For example if the CPU utilisation on a router goes above x% then an alert gets raised. But this technique has flaws in that there might be recurring […]
Are you noticing a slow, but just perceptible shift being driven by the most progressive CSPs towards the slimming down of their OSS? And not just the yo-yo dieting where there’s a brief period of reduction followed by increased bloat, but sustained reductionist thinking. Making do without some of the features being offered by vendors […]
“TOSCA models are ‘declarative’ in that they describe WHAT it is you’re trying to provision (as opposed to ‘prescriptive’ models that describe HOW you’re going to get there). ONF uses the term ‘intent’ to describe the same concept, and yet others refer to these types of models as ‘desired-state’ models. While there are subtle nuances […]
Data integrity law #1 – When being handled, the accuracy / integrity of a data set tends to degrade over time. Data integrity law #2 – To prevent rule #1 from making the data unusable, the data needs to be curated. Data integrity law #3 – Curating data always carries a cost. Data integrity law […]
Those seem to be the three highest priorities for sponsors of OSS projects at the moment. In other words, that means improved efficiencies. Many translate this to requiring CAPEX projects that deliver new things (that in turn drive new efficiencies). This mindset is particularly true for the vendors who are trying to oust their competitors’s […]
This blog regularly discusses the need to simplify everything in OSS. However this runs contrary to the perspective of many integrators. From their perspective, the more complex, the more effort required, therefore the greater the income for them (albeit greater cost [and sometimes bitterness] from their customers). After all, services usually have higher margins than […]
