Minimise the tentacles on the OctopOSS. Keep it simple
“Refining is inevitable in science when you have made measurements of a phenomenon for a long period of time.” Charles Francis Richter. When setting up your alarm / fault management modules, the KISS principle again applies. Focus first on getting raw alarms flowing and conduct audits to ensure all are reaching your OSS as planned. Only […]
“The most difficult part of requirements gathering is not the act of recording what the user wants, it is the exploratory development activity of helping users figure out what they want.” Steve McConnell. When starting out on a requirement gathering exercise, The Radar Analogy always seems to spring to mind because it carries such a […]
“We can make computers affordable by all, we can make every device smart, we can augment every aspect of our lives with technology…but not if it means we all have to be technologists. Even relatively high-tech buyers like businesses and network operators are finding it difficult or impossible to sustain the skill levels needed to […]
“The term triage may have originated during the Napoleonic Wars from the work of Dominique Jean Larrey. The term was used further during World War I by French doctors treating the battlefield wounded at the aid stations behind the front. Those responsible for the removal of the wounded from a battlefield or their care afterwards […]
“[The] basic visual cues of spatial/location, colour, shape, size and motion cues are tested. Investigations focus on two aspects, 1) Users’ ability to identify separate categories and 2) Users’ ability to differentiate visual cues.” Moonyati Yatid and Masahiro Takatsuka, in “Understanding Spatial and Non-spatial Cues in Representing Categorical Information.” Yatid and Takatsuka indicate that visual […]
“Decisions are temporary – Companies are often paralyzed by big decisions that they believe are permanent. They think that what they decide today has to be that way forever.” Jason Fried on here. This statement can be very true for OSS projects. They are so big and so intimidating for customers at times that they […]
“Planning is Vastly Overrated – 37signals doesn’t do road maps, specs, projections. They have rough ideas internally but these aren’t shared externally. Even internally they’re not set in stone or written down. Think about what’s being done now and maybe what’s next. You set expectations too soon and things changed.” Jason Fried on here. Them […]
“Entrepreneurs and their small enterprises are responsible for almost all the economic growth in the United States.” Ronald Reagan. Speaking with many of the large OSS vendors, it seems that the tier-one Telco and Utility market is still their prime sales and marketing focus, not to mention their product development focus. Interestingly, I wonder whether […]
“The trouble with the future is that it usually arrives before we’re ready for it.” Anonymous. It strikes me that there are a lot of network experts in the world but there aren’t very many OSS experts, relatively. As such, OSS is a relatively more immature market in terms of the brainpower that has been […]
“A task model is a description of the activities users perform in order to reach their goals. Task models can represent both real-world and digital activities. They help you understand how your product can fit into the users’ lives. User journeys are a method of expressing the ideal route for your product to facilitate these […]
“In the context of databases, cardinality refers to the uniqueness of data values contained in a column. High cardinality means that the column contains a large percentage of totally unique values. Low cardinality means that the column contains a lot of “repeats” in its data range.” Techopedia. Whilst researching today, I came across a word […]
“The first step towards getting somewhere is to decide that you are not going to stay where you are.” J.P. Morgan. At their core, OSS and BSS are primarily about efficiency. They are tools to make the management of the following (and many more) easier and more efficient: Order entry Alarm / event management Service […]
“Many connection providers use outdated manual procedures for design, sizing, costing and build rather than embrace new technology. Few companies have so far adopted a GIS-driven (Geographic Information System) approach to design and build that allows more accurate designs more quickly and can inform other processes such as sizing, costing and overall customer service.” Davis […]
“The difference between extracting simplicity and mastering complexity is largely whether we focus on defining the right abstractions or creating new mechanisms.” Scott Shenker. The diagram below provides a slide taken from a speech by Scott Shenker on the principles behind SDN (Software Defined Networking). You can listen to the words surrounding this slide roughly […]
“Carriers could have a couple of different viewpoints [on SDN]. One is we’ve gotta do something on our equipment costs because they’re not going down as fast as traffic is going up. Others say I want to compete with the data centre operators, the cloud providers. Others say I just want greater service velocity. I […]
“The best ideas lose their owners and take on lives of their own.” N. Bushnell. In yesterday’s blog, we discussed a new product to infuse innovation more deeply within a CSP via its OSS, partly based on the concept of EMC|ONE. On the back of EMC’s work, they propose “Ron Burt’s theory of structural holes […]
“Always give more in use value than what you take in cash value.” Wallace D. Wattles. What does this mean exactly? Well, in the context of an OSS, it basically means that the CSP gets more value from their OSS than what they’ve paid a supplier / integrator for it. Given that OSS are big […]
“Scientists have been warning about global warming for decades. It’s too late to stop it now, but we can lessen its severity and impacts.” David Suzuki. We’ve all heard the stories of global warming leading to increasing occurrences of cataclysmic weather events. Further to yesterday’s blog about big data and the ever-increasing data flowing through […]
“We looked at the areas of technical and commercial risk within data access projects, and created a combination of product features and commercial policies that, as far as is possible, mitigate this risk.” Ontology website. The diagram link above shows the five principles put forward by an organisation named Ontology. It just so happens that […]
“I do all my work by storyboard, so as I draw the storyboard, the world gets more and more complex, and as a result, my North, South, East, West directions kind of shift and go off base…” Hayao Miyazaki. Does your B/OSS have the ability to track each interaction relating to a customer, through all […]
