Minimise the tentacles on the OctopOSS. Keep it simple
“Eliminate the things that don’t matter, that you’re never going to get better at or that you’re already good at. What’s left are the places where you have the opportunity to change your position in the market.” Seth Godin In many ways, the quote above holds true for whether you’re a vendor, a CSP or […]
“I want to go to meetings where the inputs are donuts, not the outputs*.” Scott Morrison An OctopOSS can be an all-encompassing beast. It can impact so many peoples’s lives. But this also means that the list of invitees to meetings can explode. I have a theory that a meeting’s outcomes will generally be inversely […]
“A guarantee in this life: Change! Flexibility is better than predictability!” Evinda Lepin There are two distinctly differing views regarding customisation of your OSS: A specifically customised solution will deliver more efficient processing A specifically customised solution allows no room for flexibility Which solution would you seek to deliver and why? My first OctopOSS was […]
“Simply put, Landing Page Optimization has a high ROI” ecommercepartners.net In the world of e-Commerce, the concept of having multiple landing pages is an important method to determine which of your marketing strategies or sales copy is the most successful. Now it’s quite obvious that OSS are not directly comparable with e-Commerce websites. However, are […]
“The value of your time increases as you lose it“ You are an OSS vendor and let’s say you have a maximum of 40 programmer hours available each week. Let’s also say that you have 20 hours allocated to development of the next version of your product and typically spend another 10 hours on product […]
“We are addicted to our thoughts. We cannot change anything if we cannot change our thinking.” Santosh Kalwar Drug dealers have enough faith in the addictive nature of their product that they can offer a free trial, knowing their customers will be back. Without having the deadly effects, can a free trial of your OSS […]
“Bureaucracy defends the status quo long past the time when the quo has lost its status.” Laurence J. Peter In the past all CSPs were big and their associated OctopOSS were also big. Many million dollars big. But those projects were also complex, time consuming and often delivered little of what they originally intended. It […]
“You will never understand bureaucracies until you understand that for bureaucrats procedure is everything and outcomes are nothing.” Thomas Sowell In many large CSPs, bureaucracy is a way of life. Procedures provide the bureaucrats with a port of consistency within a sea of change. An OctopOSS project is a very threatening beast because it changes […]
“Remember, you’re trying to control a market, not out-feature another product” Bob Rice in Three Moves Ahead Bob Rice’s quote above is really relevant in the OSS marketplace. Vendors appear to compete on the number of features. This is an admirable approach, but is it the equivalent of a car-maker putting a 43rd cup-holder in […]
“It has always been my belief that a man should do his best, regardless of how much he receives for his services, or the number of people he may be serving or the class of people served.” Napoleon Hill Have you ever noticed that the most successful* OSS integrators/vendors are more heavily focussed on providing […]
“The whole is other than the sum of the parts” Kurt Koffka Early proponents of Gestalt Theory like Koffka indicated that humans perceive a whole solution (eg water) quickly and intuitively before taking the time to consider the constituent parts (eg rain drops, water molecules, etc). The 80/20 rule of human perception?? User Interfaces generally […]
“Herbert Simon, who won a Nobel Prize for economics… identified a decision strategy he calls satisficing: selecting the first option that works. Satisficing is different from optimizing, which means trying to come up with the best strategy. Optimizing is hard, and it takes a long time. Satisficing is more efficient. The singular evaluation strategy is […]
“If people knew how hard I worked to get my mastery, it wouldn’t seem so wonderful at all.” Michelangelo It strikes me that the worker of today focuses on an ever-narrower field of specialisation. Cross-functional teams offer a means of cross-pollenisation of ideas between specialists in their fields but does each individual in the team […]
“The first rule of any technology used in a business is that automation applied to an efficient operation will magnify the efficiency. The second is that automation applied to an inefficient operation will magnify the inefficiency.” Bill Gates Variation is the enemy of continual improvement, so once your OSS is operational you are seeking conformity, […]
“When you think you can’t, revisit a previous triumph.”. Jack Canfield Just as naming conventions are important within the OctopOSS at an application level, so are numbering plans at a network level. The OctopOSS often introduces as significant increase in IP addresses allocated to network management (eg on the management VLAN). For the purpose of […]
“Anyone who stops learning is old, whether at twenty or eighty.” Henry Ford Henry Ford is widely acknowledged for creating the production line that revolutionised the automobile industry, bringing cars within financial reach of the common man. However, Ford’s autobiography states that he borrowed the idea from the “disassembly” lines used by Armour for processing […]
“The ability to simplify means to eliminate the unnecessary so that the necessary may speak.” Hans Hofmann OSS vendors have already developed alarm “prioritisation” tools such as de-duplication, escalation, suppression, correlation, etc to help reduce noise. Root-cause Analysis is only as good as the gurus who can identify the patterns of events and then build […]
“To the man who only has a hammer, everything he encounters begins to look like a nail.” Abraham Maslow In the case of OSS, our hammer is the computer monitor, keyboard and mouse, which are the weapons of choice for interacting with the OSS tools. But are they the best I/O (Input / Output) devices […]
“An elephant doesn’t canter” Proverb Are the CSPs becoming too afraid to make major OSS transformations? Have they tried and failed previously? Have the seen their peers try and fail? Are their OctopOSS just too large, too complex and too unwieldy to make significant upgrades without introducing major cost, schedule, brand and reliability risks? In […]
“63% of all statistics are made up… including this one“ Dilbert A CSP I know has a detailed set of KPIs assigned to the various parts of its provisioning factory. A key customer of that CSP was given the highest priority of orders through the provisioning factory by the CSP’s CEO. But after a year, […]
