“Sometimes you are in sync with the times, sometimes you are in advance, sometimes you are late.”
Bernardo Bertolucci.
Yesterday we spoke of the OSS of the future not having an offline database that needs to be synchronised against network assets regularly. As we all know, data synch is one of the banes of an OSS operators existence.
Another area of generic weakness within the OSS industry is the ability to show inventory based on multiple different snapshots in time. They are good at showing a (near) current state and perhaps one future planned state, but are generally not so good at showing multiple future states whereby multiple different network roll-out projects overlap.
This is where a visualisation tool and offline database does come into play. But you’ll have noticed that it is separated from the real “production” data because that resides on the network itself. The visualisation tool can demonstrate what the network might look like at any number of snapshots in time or project phases into the future. The visualisation tool can be spatial (ie overlaid on a map) or logical views (ie simplified node and arc connection diagrams).
Interestingly, I’ve found that the requirement for multiple future, or past, snapshots in time is a more important feature for some utilities than it is for telcos. This might be worth noting if your OSS regularly caters for utility customers.
Now, the next iteration of this hypothetical future product is to be able to push designs / configurations down to the physical network, either via work orders (physical network builds) or via provisioning interfaces (logical networks).