Minimise the tentacles on the OctopOSS. Keep it simple
“Shift No. 6: From Mass-Market Supply to Tailored Offerings. OLD QUESTION: How should we organise our company’s operations to serve the mass market efficiently while offering customised products? NEW QUESTION: How should we organise the supply chain to serve each customer or segment uniquely and provide a tailored customer experience?” Laura Ross Kopczak and M. […]
“Social TV app Zeebox (recently rebranded as Beamly) thought it was doing the right thing by moving from a tabbed interface to a navigation drawer, but the results were catastrophic — customer engagement dropped by half! Zeebox scrambled to issue an update that restored the tabbed UI. A second attempt proved equally disastrous. What started […]
“Its supply chains were long and expensive – at one stage with 11,000 contractors Lego had more suppliers than Boeing used to build its aircraft! And its product development had become increasingly complex, with many product ranges involving such a wide range of choice – for example the Pirate figures had no less than 10 […]
“The best way to systematize your business is to first do each job yourself. Find the best or preferred way to do each task, and create a system for doing it that way that is easy to follow. Repeat this process for every function of your business until every part is systematized..” Michael Gerber. The […]
“The smart way to optimise infrastructure is to incorporate optimality into the design.” Geoff Prince. In a recent presentation by Mike Quigley, NBN Co’s departing CEO, he mentioned that OSS/BSS gave him his biggest nightmares. One of the NBN Co’s other significant problems he mentioned was the preparation of designs to service every home in Australia […]
“Multi-Technology Operations System Interface (MTOSI) is a standard for implementing interfaces between OSSs. Service providers (carriers) use multiple Operational Support Systems (OSS) to manage complex networks. Since the various parts of the network must interact, so must the OSSs. It is standardized by the Telemanagement Forum (TM Forum). The TMF Frameworx provides a set of […]
“The industry talks a lot about the network data plane and the network control plane, but it tends to hand wave over the management plane in SDN. The management plane is extremely important, however, because it defines how services and applications are orchestrated. In order to run a large infrastructure, you need abstraction. In order […]
“Spend 70 percent of your time on the core business, 20 percent on related projects, and 10 percent on unrelated new businesses.” Attributed to Eric Schmidt here on CNN.com. Yesterday we spoke of the 70/20/10 Learning Model. Today we apply the same ratio, but this time it relates the the principle used by Eric Schmidt […]
“Turns out that most of us don’t like losing. In fact, it’s what the academics call loss aversion. We feel the pain of loss more acutely than we feel the pleasure of gain. In other words, we may like to win, but we hate to lose.” Carl Richards here on NYTimes. If you’ve ever worked […]
“It started with ‘What incredible benefits can we give to the customer…Where can we take the customer?’ Not starting with ‘Let’s sit down with the engineers and figure out what awesome technology we have and how we’re going to market that.’” Steve Jobs. Do you exactly know who uses your OSS (not which customers, but […]
“I first met him… at a dinner my mother had put together. On my way there, I thought, ‘Why would I want to meet this guy who picks stocks?’ I thought he just used various market-related things—like volume, or how the price had changed over time—to make his decisions. But when we started talking that […]
“If there is to be reconciliation, first there must be truth.” Timothy B. Tyson. There are two main categories of billing: Metering Charging In the case of metering, this is the measurement of actual usage of communication services. An example would be the flagfall upon setup of a telephone call and an additional cost per […]
“Action and reaction, ebb and flow, trial and error, change – this is the rhythm of living.” Bruce Barton. I have a really left-field idea to run past you today. I’d love your thoughts about its feasibility (or lack of!). During a major incident (eg alarm storm, security attack, etc) your network health visualisation tools […]
“In the struggle between capital and labor, more often than not capital has won, because the real source of value for most companies has historically been the hard assets that they owned and controlled.” James Surowiecki. Yesterday we spoke of the different types of interface “objects” such as probes, robots, MDDs (Mediation Device Drivers), etc […]
“If the “best of breed” solutions are all very “different” there may be a great deal of training and overhead that may not be there if they are all from a smaller set of vendors with a similar “technology”.” Richard Bragg. During a recent LinkedIn Group discussion about the comparisons of Best-of-breed versus single-vendor OSS […]
“Regression testing means re-testing an application after its code has been modified to verify that it still functions correctly. Regression testing consists of re-running existing test cases and checking that code changes did not break any previously working functions, inadvertently introduce errors or cause earlier fixed issues to reappear. These test cases should be run […]
“What would we expect to find if we examined the brain scans of people with high versus average IQ scores? We might picture the active brain of an Einstein as a hotbed of smoldering colors ”but we’d be wrong. Neurologist Richard Restak summarized a UCLA study that compared individuals with high IQs to those with […]
“[Hermann Ebbinghaus’s] forgetting curve describes the exponential loss of information that one has learned. The sharpest decline occurs in the first twenty minutes and the decay is significant through the first hour. The curve levels off after about one day.” Wikipedia. As discussed in Ted Gannan’s recent blog, “Job-related training is an exercise in helping […]
“Life is full of surprises and serendipity. Being open to unexpected turns in the road is an important part of success. If you try to plan every step, you may miss those wonderful twists and turns.” Condoleeza Rice. Product and Service Lifecycle Management (PSLM) can be a key differentiator* for competing CSPs. In turn, the […]
“The nice thing about doing a crossword puzzle is, you know there is a solution.” Stephen Sondheim. I won’t for one moment try to convince you that there is a single right answer to your OSS puzzle like there is for crosswords as Stephen Sondheim suggests. Nothing could be further from the truth. There are […]
