Minimise the tentacles on the OctopOSS. Keep it simple
“What revenue model should I use? = the wrong question to ask. Why will people pay me? = the right question“ The Board of Innovation. There are so many different revenue models in OSS that there are no simple apples-for-apples comparisons on price. There are perpetual licenses, annual licenses, processor-based licensing, node-based licensing, named user […]
““Life is really simple, but we insist on making it complicated..” Confucius. As technologists, we all have a tendency to speak in jargon with our peers. Having worked on OSS projects in many countries, I’ve been amazed at how different the OSS jargon is within our industry, within different companies and even by different groups […]
“I don’t look at myself as a commodity, but I’m sure a lot of people have.” Marilyn Monroe Will there be a time in the not too distant future where traditional telco services become a pure commodity? For example, will users simply plug into socket in their wall and get ubiquitous bandwidth / cloud services […]
“…don’t ask your customers what they like or don’t like about your product. Or what they’d change if they could. That’s all about you. If you want really insightful answers, ask them about themselves instead. You can find out a ton about you by asking them about them.” Jason Fried. Let’s say you were out […]
“Most of the services being churned out today are long-tailed and flame out quickly, making them ill-suited to siloed management. A new philosophy of enablement is needed, suitable for an ecosystem where innovation could come from anywhere, and this is why the business support system must evolve into the business enablement suite (BES).” Jiao Aijun […]
“Testing as a Service (TaaS) – People, process, accelerators, tools, technologies delivered in a consumable as-a-service model” Ahmed Adel in this Slideshare pack Testing as a Service has its merits for performing quality control on an OSS product set. It certainly provides greater resourcing flexibility and the swarm engineering model allows a faster time to […]
“Be aggressive in simplifying the BOSS to the bare minimum as customers are not seeing the difference of all the bells and whistles” Alan Quayle. Have you ever noticed that almost every B/OSS project is an upgrade, addition or a transformation? There are barely ever any reduction-only projects. I often wonder whether the large CSPs […]
“The digital world is much more fragmented – an ecosystem of different players each delivering their element of the service – with a different access network, core network, computing, storage and many applications providers. And where services comprise a number of aggregated application services, the challenges get even harder. If the only person getting the […]
“There are no exceptions to the rule that everybody likes to be an exception to the rule.” Charles Osgood. When it comes to customer experience management at a CSP, Charles Osgood’s statement rings true. A friend of mine recently talked about the challenge of solution design where “Everyone is an exception.” When it comes to […]
“You can’t plan a script. The beauty of improvisation is you are experiencing it in the moment. If you try to plan what the next line is supposed to be, you’re just going to be disappointed when the other people on stage with you don’t do or say what you want them to do and […]
“I’d like to think I’m a great teacher.” Gordon Ramsay. I’m not a fan of reality TV, but a friend recently pointed out that there was a common theme in Gordon Ramsay’s kitchen makeovers. He always seems to reduce the menu from 30-ish dishes to the 10-ish that can be done well and become the […]
“The value of products and services today is based more and more on creativity — the innovative ways that they take advantage of new materials, technologies, and processes. Value creation in the past was a function of economies of industrial scale: mass production and the high efficiency of repeatable tasks. Value creation in the future […]
“Moore’s law is the observation that over the history of computing hardware, the number of transistors on integrated circuits doubles approximately every two years“ Wikipedia. Would you like to predict the future of OSS? Sounds like a tough ask right? Where would you start? Personally, I’d start by looking at proven trends of exponential growth […]
“Cycle time reduction in marketing and sales deals with speeding the time-to-market cycle for new products and services and reducing the order-to-cash cycle time, which produces benefits such as increased cash flows and profits, improved utilisation of human and machine resources, decreased costs and improved customer service” S. Rao Vallabhaneni. OSS can have a big […]
“One challenge we faced was that product managers tend to introduce products with too many variables to manage. For example, we had an ATM/Frame service that could be configured across 12 billion combinations. Well, how do you build an ordering system with so many variables? The answer is to simplify the product options, so at […]
“It is common for us to receive an e-mail from a customer apologizing for not responding sooner because they thought our automated follow-up was being done manually. The key to a successful follow-up program is personalization and making it relevant for the customer.” John Hopkins. Why did Apple’s iPod revolutionise the music industry? Was it […]
“Clouds come floating into my life, no longer to carry rain or usher storm, but to add color to my sunset sky.” Rabindranath Tagore. In yesterday’s blog I discussed the aircraft carrier analogy when bringing rapid change into a legacy OSS. The CSPs of the future will need to be based around partnerships. Not just […]
““Most people do not listen with the intent to understand; they listen with the intent to reply.” Stephen R. Covey. Enlist and silent are both anagrams. They also have one other anagram that is important for OSS consultants and integrators in particular. Can you guess what this vital skill is? A hint would be that […]
“Companies can get too big. There is such a thing as diseconomies of scale, which occurs when companies get less efficient after reaching a certain size.” Chris Mayer In the agrarian age, a vendor typically had a small, local, loyal tribe. In the industrial age, “factories” dominated creating vastly more product more efficiently and was […]
“Part of the challenge of being an entrepreneur, if you’re going for a really huge opportunity, is trying to find problems that aren’t quite on the radar yet and try to solve those.” Sean Parker One of my favourite vendor selection and requirements gathering stories relates to a tender that was run by the Air […]
