Many years ago, I was lucky enough to spend a year advising the executive team of an Asian monopoly carrier. I was helping them to implement their first ever OSS project. It was a real eye-opener on many different levels.
This carrier had a strong culture of hoarding knowledge. It was well known amongst the staff that you didn’t share any information with anyone else, especially if you were the only person who had that knowledge. Even more so if that knowledge was your leverage to ensure that they could never fire you.
I guess you could say it was a form of knowledge extortion.
I found it really interesting, mainly because I’d never even considered that as an option. For whatever reason, I’ve always had an abundance mindset when it comes to knowledge and am happy to share what limited knowledge I have (as the 2,500+ articles on this blog might attest) because there’s always more knowledge to collect.
That perspective remained true across that project. I could sense the disbelief from my local colleagues any time I shared any meaty facts, figures or insights about the world of OSS. It was a combination of being impressed (at the information they gained), but shocked (that it would be just given away so freely). It was quite funny!
But that was back in the days when there wasn’t so much information available online. Most of the information that was carefully protected by my colleagues was meticulously harvested from experience, OSS vendor manuals and training materials, all of which came at a very high price (footed by the telco).
It would be fascinating to go back to that telco now and see whether that culture has shifted. The world’s access to information has certainly changed in a massive way in the ensuing period. Platforms like Google, YouTube and OpenAI have changed the dynamic significantly. Now anyone with an Internet connection can, relatively easily, find out almost anything they’re curious about.
Knowledge is (no longer) power.
Most knowledge has been democratised.
It’s no longer about the knowledge we keep in our brain.
Power now comes from the questions we ask.
Power comes from the snippets of knowledge that we can creatively connect.
Your ability to deeply connect is power.
Doing is power.
In a world where information abounds, it’s skills (earned by learning and then doing) that are power.
It’s not so much that we have an information overload problem, but an implementation underload problem.
Before founding Passionate About OSS (PAOSS), I loved the role that I was doing at a carrier here in Australia. However, it was frustrating. I felt like a 5 day week only delivered 1 day of progress. The other 4 days of potential progress seemed to be consumed by the bureaucratic process of meetings / collaborations, endless document reviews / re-writes, approvals, etc.
It wasn’t just that carrier, but each of the other big carriers that I worked with… They all seemed to impart a ~20% efficiency factor on me, which was infuriating. I was actually beginning to wonder whether I was just getting inefficient in my old age (probably true). Luckily, when I started working from the outside in to those same carriers (after founding PAOSS), I immediately started to feel like each day of effort was delivering a day of forward progress again! Phew!!
But, recently an awareness that we now have the tools to know anything has got me re-thinking. What can we do to help improve efficiency in the world of telco and OSS?
For a start we can do less talking and more doing (I’m pointing the finger inwards [at myself] as well as outwards here!). We can do less meetings. But we already know those two concepts.
I wonder whether it just comes down to the speed of decisions? If we can make a commitment to just make each decision by the end of the day instead of by end of week, then we gain a 5x increase in decision speed. Then if we work backwards, we could ponder what has to happen to make faster decisions?
For a start, could we cut back on meetings / collaborations, endless document reviews / re-writes, approvals, etc? Do we only insert all of these because telco employees are incentivised to make perfect decisions (or perhaps more precisely, to not make a false decision or there will be social punishment and career-limiting behaviours)? [Do we consider where outsourced contractors are on time and materials contracts that incentivise taking as long as possible to complete a task?]
Compare this to the world of IT, which has more of a culture of build, fail fast (sometimes) and iterate. Is that why most of the innovations in telco in recent decades have actually been borrowed from IT?
What if, all the way from the top of the organisation, employees were encouraged and incentivised for speed and iterative improvements rather than “don’t stuff up” and make sure every decision is triple-checked and then audited and then scrutinised and then pontificated over before actually being implemented? Would our OSS not become so complex and bloated (and take soooo long to deliver)?
Would that Asian telco be better served by switching from a culture of “knowledge is power” to “speed is power?”
I know. It’s more nuanced than that, but I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments below!
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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.
