Minimise the tentacles on the OctopOSS. Keep it simple
“My goal is no longer to get more done, but rather to have less to do.” Francine Jay. A few questions for all the vendors out there. Do you know which applications within your suite that your customers actually use? Do you know which features of these applications they use? Do you know which features […]
“The more you engage with customers the clearer things become and the easier it is to determine what you should be doing.” John Russell. You must be wondering whether the heading above is a typo? It’s not. Let me explain. This is the fifth post in my Customer Experience series. The previous four have been […]
“When you translate a dream into reality, it’s never a full implementation. It is easier to dream than to do.” Shai Agassi. After Contract Negotiations, the second post in this Customer Experience series, today’s post discusses the next step, when the project moves into the implementation phase. The customer experience during the implementation stage basically […]
“Suspicion and doubt lead to animosity and hatred.” Ralph Steadman. To expand upon the first post in this Customer Experience series, which was on Product Evaluation, today’s post relates to the next step, forming a contract between the customer and the winning bidder. The customer experience during the contract negotiation stage basically revolves around suspicion. […]
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“The most common thing that pegs an entrepreneur as an amateur is when they come in and immediately start talking about their amazing new technology, and forget to start the discussion with, “What big problem in the market am I trying to solve?” If they don’t start with the problem, then I know they are […]
“Upstream marketing focuses on innovation. It tries to answer two questions: where the market is moving and what customers will want next.” Scott Thompson here on Chron.com. As indicated in yesterday’s post, I have a series of posts coming up shortly that will look at the customer experience and how OSS might look at doing […]
“It’s what you learn after you know it all that counts.” Harry S Truman. In recent blogs, “Data Architecture Levels” and “Testing Architecture Levels,” the need for contextually relevant data has been mentioned. One of the other areas where contextually relevant data is essential, but very often ignored, is in training delivery. For the purposes […]
“We left the meeting with a list of open issues, not a handshake.” David Sacks. “Best-of-breed versus single vendor” is an age-old discussion point between OSS exponents. There is no right answer to this argument, with every customer having different needs. However, when speaking about the best-of-breed model, I sometimes use the handshake analogy to […]
“That’s been one of my mantras – focus and simplicity. Simple can be harder than complex: You have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple. But it’s worth it in the end because once you get there, you can move mountains.” Steve Jobs. What’s the most important task you have […]
“The least productive people are usually the ones who are most in favor of holding meetings.” Thomas Sowell. Massive OSS projects can tend to spawn massive numbers of meetings with the intent of keeping everyone informed of all the moving parts. Have you ever stopped to think about how much each of your meetings costs? […]
“The formulation of the problem is often more essential than its solution, which may be merely a matter of mathematical or experimental skill.” Albert Einstein. If you’ve ever been a solutions integrator or an implementing vendor, have you ever noticed that the more technically proficient your customer is, the more likely you are to receive […]
“The world is wide, and I will not waste my life in friction when it could be turned into momentum.” Frances E. Willard. As you all know already, OSS projects can be large, complex and cumbersome. Over the years, I’ve found so many different styles of inertia at play, some conspiratorial, but mostly related to […]
“My current project is on data integrity where telco has number of bespoke inventory systems, systems acquired as part of M&As and COTS product. I am trying to put end to end story line in terms of process for data extraction, data investigation and analysis, data correction, impact on upstream and downstream systems. There can […]
“The art and science of asking questions is the source of all knowledge.” Thomas Berger. Source data is often the bane of the data migrator. We go to all lengths to manipulate, cleanse, create and otherwise fix errors in the data. But sometimes it’s simpler than that. Sometimes we have the opportunity of going to […]
“The quickest way to enter the fourth dimension is through an operation called Fork. A fork copies a three-dimensional repository, creating two equal but distinct repositories. A commit performed against one repository has no impact on the other, which means the codebases contained within will become more and more different, and eventually evolve into different […]
“As far as the customer is concerned, the interface is the product.” Jef Raskin. A dream of mine since 2000, the days when Oracle forms were the user interface to the OSS I was using, was the ability to provide drag and drop provisioning of services / circuits. The dream was basically a rip-off of […]
“….I thought about the problem of communication of vision and strategy a lot, but I didn’t realise how the functional, hierarchical structure we’d borrowed from the military made communication in large organisations possible. Thinking a lot more about it since, I think the military model – the foundation of the industrial, functional, hierarchical organisation structure […]
“There are two ways to look at analytics in an Operations environment: • POST Cognitive • PRE Cognitive Post-cognitive is focusing your service management efforts on looking at events that occurred in a history after an outage. Post-cognitive is akin to driving down the road while looking out of the back window.” Dougie Stevenson on […]
“If IT Services departments were restaurants, they would be the most expensive, a la carte kind with long waiting lists. “Yes madam, just tell us your requirements and our food consultant will propose several different meal solutions. You can order anything you like and we will be serving it up next year!”“ Jake Holloway, in […]
