Challenger carriers are the high-speed traders of the telco world: How does this manifest in their OSS?

In the last week alone, I’ve had two potent reminders that the world of OSS is simply (pun intended) too complex.

This manifests in many ways, but I’ll start with the standards that underpin our industry.

The standards bodies do fantastic work. I’m a huge fan. Enormous credit should go out to everyone who has contributed to the development of the multitude of standards because I know how much work it takes from their many contributors and how important those efforts are. Unfortunately, nearly every client I show our most widely used standards to finds them too unwieldy, complex and time-consuming to use.

Most standards are developed “by tier ones for tier ones” and are therefore created by people whose entire careers are spent making and using highly detailed standards. Put simply, they’ve always had the time and resources to be thorough. However, based on all the feedback I get, they’re just too complex for use by the challenger telcos. The people I speak with from challenger telcos have also often spent their entire careers in telco, but need to take a more pragmatic approach to OSS-related decisions:

1. They don’t have the time to learn or understand or utilise elaborate standards
2. They don’t have the time to implement the standards to their full extent
3. They don’t have the time or resources to conduct thorough vendor selection processes
4. They don’t have the time or resources to learn how to use complicated OSS tools or subsequently teach their broader teams on how to use them
5. They don’t have the resources to enter into lengthy time and materials contracts with suppliers (they need outcomes quickly)
6. They don’t have the resources to create complex customisations or integrations across their OSS suite (they need ready-to-go, out-of-the-box)
7. They don’t have the time or resources to gather or create documentation that helps make a decision (eg solution architecture “phone books” that detail the design of a proposed new OSS)
8. They don’t have the time to procrastinate about transformations whilst fleeting opportunities pass them by (thus allowing competitors to run with the competitive advantage instead)

Put simply (literally this time), the challenger carriers that I deal with are the high-speed traders of the telco world. Every extra second is an arbitrage opportunity or opportunity lost.

Yet most aspects of OSS – standards, but many other facets too (as per the OSS Friction Continuums) – don’t operate with this sense of urgency in mind.

In response, we’ve had to develop heavily simplified versions of standards, templates, methodologies, audit / evaluation tools, etc to make them more easily usable for our clients. Quite a few of them are available here on the PAOSS website. But this isn’t a holier than thou proclamation about how good we are. The opposite actually. It’s an admission of guilt.

Put bluntly, twice in the last week, I’ve had reminders that even our simplified equivalents should be continually refined. We need to continue to strip them back further to make them simpler, more accessible and more intuitive.

There can be a tendency for telco software, standards, etc to be continually added to, furthering the bloat in the process. They, like us, need to spend time removing, not just adding. To quote Bruce Lee, “It is not daily increase, but daily decrease. Hack away at the unessential.“