As the title asks, do you know what the most widely used OSS/BSS application is? The answer might actually surprise you, but we’ll get to that a little later in the article.
Late last year, we published an article that outlined that a A seismic shift is already underway in IT circles and how it will fundamentally change OSS/BSS product designs. The article built upon concepts shared in an IA Summit Keynote by Charles Lamanna, the Corporate VP of Business Apps & Platforms at Microsoft. He suggests that every (OSS) company is currently a software company, but imminently every (OSS) company will become an AI (Artificial Intelligence) company.
ChatGPT has caught many by surprise as to how fast this shift has changed and will continue to change our worlds. If you’re an OSS Product Manager and aren’t already starting to intuit ChatGPT for informing your product roadmap, then I’d like to suggest that you should probably start (it’s definitely informing some of the roadmaps I’ve been asked to contribute to more recently).
Even if you consider AI in OSS to be an over-used, mis-used and over-hyped buzzword, ChatGPT should be informing your user-interface design if nothing else. Two things from ChatGPT stand out as being pertinent for consideration in OSS designs – the simple question-answer interface and iterative feedback (aka Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback – RLHF).
Long-time readers of this blog will know that I regularly use the following long-tail diagram to contrast where product development roadmaps are being focused (ie adding new features at the far-right of the blue arrow) versus where they should be focused (ie improving the effectiveness inside the red-shaded box).
The bars at the left of this long-tail chart show the high-volume / high-value functionality offered by OSS products. This is where the needle is really moved when trying to improve the efficiency of network operations. This is where business cases tend to succeed or fail. The bars on the right side of the arrow are the functionalities that have little impact, but are great at differentiating one product (I have 1,001 features) from another (I only have 1,000 features) in an RFP (unfortunately).
However, the attention on ChatGPT gives us the opportunity to re-focus the spotlight back on what really matters. It gives us a chance to come back to all those “boring old features” that every competitor has (ie the ones in the red-shaded box) and totally revisit how they look and behave. ChatGPT gives us the opportunity to totally refactor the appearance of our OSS solutions but with one important difference. This refactoring simultaneously makes the product differentiated and more effective.
We have a short window of time before all suppliers realise that this is where the competitive battle will be fought and everyone starts refactoring too.
This opportunity to refactor should consider not just the human interface (the GUI), but the machine interface (the MUI / API). It should consider a design that only has humans in the loop (RLHF) not driving workflows manually (wherever possible). The green boxes on the revised diagram below show sample percentages of volume / effort / transactions being run by machines rather than humans. It’s in this freeing up of human involvement where new business cases and differentiation can really stack up.
But don’t think that this will be constrained to the UI. In the past, many OSS have been really difficult to use because they have so much functionality baked into the many menus, buttons, screens, etc. As each new function was added, the OSS became more like Frankenstein’s monster, with new cruft being bolted on function-by-function. But ChatGPT gives us a window into a much more elegant design – a natural-language and iterative interface. It shows the possibility for an operator to just ask what they want to be presented with and the ChatGPT (or equivalent Large Language Model – LLM) figures out the response. If the LLM doesn’t get it right the first time, the operator can help guide it towards what they do want (via RLHF).
But the elegance goes a couple of layers deeper than the interface alone. If we look at it in relation to the table below:
The code-base of the business logic layer shrinks. We no longer have to pre-build logic to answer pre-defined questions. The Generative AI solution can bypass most of the logical layer, allowing the user to ask questions directly of the data.
The new OSS interface might be a question / answer screen, but the answer might not just comprise of text like ChatGPT (at the time of writing). It might include more immersive responses that include a mix of:
In fact, it is likely that low-code, AI-driven applications like Microsoft PowerApps will allow users to customise their own OSS interfaces as easily as they create slide decks or spreadsheets today.
And that brings us back around to answering the question posed in the title – what is the most widely used OSS/BSS application?
I don’t know the answer for sure, but I’m quite confident in suspecting that it is Excel. So many OSS solutions have Excel spreadsheets used somewhere in their stack – either directly (I’ve seen network cable maps with thousands of individual fibre strands mapped out for entire cities in Excel) or as a supporting function (for ingestion and visualisation of CSV files that have been exported from OSS tools). There’s a simple reason for this. As Charles Lamanna pointed out in his keynote above, there are only around 10M people in the world who can code in Python, but there are over 1 billion who can use Excel, making it arguably the most widely used low-code platform. Tools like PowerApps will make OSS customisation far more accessible and intuitive for anyone.
The question is, when you refactor your OSS to keep up with other suppliers, will yours be as easy to use too?
If you’d like to discuss how your OSS/BSS solution might evolve into an exciting future, we’d be delighted to meet with you and share ideas.
We recently discussed how the “Ultimate Game,” a study in behavioural psychology, might help to explain why there tends to be less initial animosity between
The great thing about the holiday period is you often get the chance to step away from business as usual (BAU) activities. As customer projects
Last year, we published a series of articles about the chasm that exists between OSS/BSS buyers and sellers. “The chasm” is best exemplified by the
Whilst setting up for another new initiative this week I became aware that the PAOSS blog has just ticked past 1 million words. And that’s
Here at Passionate About OSS, we are exactly that – Passionate About OSS (Operational Support Systems). We’re also passionate about BSS, NMS, or any other names you call the tools that help to operationalise your network.
