Minimise the tentacles on the OctopOSS. Keep it simple
“Whenever you read a good book, somewhere in the world a door opens to allow in more light.” Vera Nazarian. After lots of writing and refining, my book, which is dedicated to OSS implementations, is almost finished. It’s based around 22 commonly asked questions, particularly by readers who are relatively new to OSS. It also allows readers […]
“Consumers are statistics. Customers are people.” H. Stanley Marcus. The key OSS buying decision for customers is, “Do I have enough information to make a useful decision. If not, what would I need to know to know or what would I need to see to make a decision?” Understand what the barriers to saying yes […]
“The Japanese have a wonderful sense of design and a refinement in their art. They try to produce beautiful paintings with the minimum number of strokes.” David Rockefeller. Have you ever sat back and wondered what has worked on your OSS projects or operations? Have you been able to figure out why it has worked? […]
“What is life without incompatible realities?” Ursula K. Le Guin. One of the nifty features of many inventory management solutions is their compatibility rules. They’re effectively the equivalent of ensuring a designer doesn’t put a square peg in a round hole. A sample use-case is when trying to build a 1 Gigabit (1Gb) Ethernet circuit, […]
“Innovation has nothing to do with how many R&D dollars you have. When Apple came up with the Mac, IBM was spending at least 100 times more on R&D. It’s not about money. It’s about the people you have, how you’re led, and how much you get it.” Steve Jobs. I love this concept – […]
“It’s more fun to be a pirate than to join the navy.” Steve Jobs. I’m currently reading a book by Peter Sander entitled, “What would Steve Jobs Do?” Peter describes the following key take-aways for establishing a vision from his analysis of Steve’s actions: What would I want from a product / experience? What would surprise […]
“in today’s digital services economy no single company can now survive as an independent entity and succeed for a sustained period. It is crucial that organisations focus on core competency, and partner to gain access to the competencies outside of that.” TM Forum’s “Open Digital Ecosystem: Business Partnering Guide, Practical guidelines for Partnering in the […]
“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 […]
