We all know that once installed, OSS tend to stay in place for many years. Too much effort to air-lift in. Too much effort to air-lift back out, especially if tightly integrated over time.
The monolithic COTS (off-the-shelf) tools of the past would generally be commissioned and customised during the initial implementation project, with occasional integrations thereafter. That meant we needed to plan out what functionality might be required in future years and ask for it to be implemented, just in case. Along with all the baked-in functionality that is never needed, and the just in case but possibly never used, we ended up with a lot of bloat in our OSS.
With the current approach of implementing core OSS building blocks, then utilising rapid release and microservice techniques, we have an ongoing enhancement train. This provides us with an opportunity to build just in time, to build only functionality that we know to be essential.
This has pluses and minuses. On the plus side, we have more opportunity to restrict delivery to only what’s needed. On the minus side, a just in time mindset can build a stop-gap culture rather than strategic, long-term thinking. It’s always good to have long-term thinkers / planners on the team to steer the rapid release implementations (and reductions / refactoring) and avoid a new cause of bloat.
Standing out in a highly saturated and fragmented OSS market can be really difficult. We’re regularly involved in bake-offs where we see dozens of OSS
One of the things I love about my job is all the vendor demos I get to see. Product demos are one of the four
Have you read the book, “The 4-hour work week” by Tim Ferris? It was one of those relatively rare books that inspired a complete mindset
Over the years, we’ve been involved in many OSS procurement events and have seen a variety of different pricing models proposed by vendors. Being software,
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.
