We talked yesterday about a range of OSS products that are more outcome-driven than our typically transactional OSS tools. There’s not many of them around at this stage. I refer to them as “data bridge” products.
Our typical OSS tools help manage transactions (alarms, activate customers services, etc). They’re generally not so great at (directly) managing objectives such as:
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Sign up an extra 50,000 customers along the new Southern network corridor this month
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Optimise allocation of our $10M capital budget to improve average attainable speeds by 20% this financial year
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Achieve 5% revenue growth in Q3
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Reduce truck rolls by 10% in the next 6 months
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Optimal management of the many factors that contribute to churn, thus reducing churn risk by 7% by next March
We provide tools to activate the extra 50,000 customers. We also provide reports / dashboards that visualise the numbers of activations. But we don’t tend to include the tools to manage ongoing modelling and option analysis to meet key objectives. Objectives that are generally quantitative and tied to time, cost, etc and possibly locations/regions.
These objectives are often really difficult to model and have multiple inputs. Managing to them requires data that’s changing on a daily basis (or potentially even more often – think of how a single missed truck-roll ripples out through re-calculation of optimal workforce allocation).
That requires:
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Access to data feeds from multiple sources (eg existing OSS, BSS and other sources like data lakes)
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Near real-time data sets (or at least streaming or regularly updating data feeds)
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An ability to quickly prepare and compare options (data modelling, possibly using machine-based learning algorithms)
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Advanced visualisations (by geography, time, budget drawdown and any graph types you can think of)
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Flexibility in what can be visualised and how it’s presented
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Methods for delivering closed-loop feedback to optimise towards the objectives (eg RPA)
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Potentially manage many different transaction-based levers (eg parallel project activities, field workforce allocations, etc) that contribute to rolled-up objectives / targets
You can see why I refer to this as a data bridge product right? I figure that it sits above all other data sources and provides the management bridge across them all.
PS. If you want to know the name of the existing products that fit into the “data bridge” category, please leave us a message.