OSS change…. but not too much… oh no…..

Let me start today with a question:
Does your future OSS/BSS need to be drastically different to what it is today?

Please leave me a comment below, answering yes or no.

I’m going to take a guess that most OSS/BSS experts will answer yes to this question, that our future OSS/BSS will change significantly. It’s the reason I wrote the OSS Call for Innovation manifesto some time back. As great as our OSS/BSS are, there’s still so much need for improvement.

But big improvement needs big change. And big change is scary, as Tom Nolle points out:
IT vendors, like most vendors, recognize that too much revolution doesn’t sell. You have to creep up on change, get buyers disconnected from the comfortable past and then get them to face not the ultimate future but a future that’s not too frightening.”

Do you feel like we’re already in the midst of a revolution? Cloud computing, web-scaling and virtualisation (of IT and networks) have been partly responsible for it. Agile and continuous integration/delivery models too.

The following diagram shows a “from the moon” level view of how I approach (almost) any new project.

The key to Tom’s quote above is in step 2. Just how far, or how ambitious, into the future are you projecting your required change? Do you even know what that future will look like? After all, the environment we’re operating within is changing so fast. That’s why Tom is suggesting that for many of us, step 2 is just a “creep up on it change.” The gap is essentially small.

The “creep up on it change” means just adding a few new relatively meaningless features at the end of the long tail of functionality. That’s because we’ve already had the most meaningful functionality in our OSS/BSS for decades (eg customer management, product / catalog management, service management, service activation, network / service health management, inventory / resource management, partner management, workforce management, etc). We’ve had the functionality, but that doesn’t mean we’ve perfected the cost or process efficiency of using it.

So let’s say we look at step 2 with a slightly different mindset. Let’s say we don’t try to add any new functionality. We lock that down to what we already have. Instead we do re-factoring and try to pull the efficiency levers, which means changes to:

  1. Platforms (eg cloud computing, web-scaling and virtualisation as well as associated management applications)
  2. Methodologies (eg Agile, DevOps, CI/CD, noting of course that they’re more than just methodologies, but also come with tools, etc)
  3. Process (eg User Experience / User Interfaces [UX/UI], supply chain, business process re-invention, machine-led automations, etc)

It’s harder for most people to visualise what the Step 2 Future State looks like. And if it’s harder to envisage Step 2, how do we then move onto Steps 3 and 4 with confidence?

This is the challenge for OSS/BSS vendors, supplier, integrators and implementers. How do we, “get buyers disconnected from the comfortable past and then get them to face not the ultimate future but a future that’s not too frightening?” And I should point out, that it’s not just buyers we need to get disconnected from the comfortable past, but ourselves, myself definitely included.

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