OSS Olympics

Yesterday I posed 10 questions, including the following, “What should be the first 10 events scheduled at an OSS Olympics?”

This is a concept I’ve pondered for years – who are the best of the best in the world of OSS?

It’s a tough one to determine though because one operator may be brilliant on one platform, but a mere amateur when given an unfamiliar platform to use. How do you evaluate it? To me, events would be based on speed as OSS are ultimately efficiency support engines.

It’s also an idea I’ve considered when coming up with an OSS benchmark for evaluating organisations and products (which I haven’t completed the finishing touches on yet).

I figured then and now that the best place to start is from a framework that many in the industry are already familiar with. That point of familiarity would most likely be TM Forum’s eTOM map, probably at Level 2 processes (or lower?).

So, the first 10 events at my OSS Olympics might be (noting that operators can use tools of their own choosing):

1. Order handling – set up a particular type of order, with complexities, and see who can generate the order the fastest into a pseudo-BSS order repository
2. Service configuration and activation – being the fastest to fulfill a complex service request on a network platform
3. Problem handling – surely OSS’s equivalent of the 100m sprint, the blue riband event, to solve a complex network problem the fastest
4. Customer QoS and SLA management – perhaps the 200m sprint, being the fastest to solve a degraded network situation
5. Resource performance management – engineering the traffic flows on a network to provide the best steady-state performance
6. Bill invoice management – taking a data set containing different products, bundles, services and customers and generating correct bills for all customers in the fastest time
7. Supplier / Partner settlements and payments management – similar to the above but taking S/P interconnect data and providing correct settlement statements the fastest
8. Product and Offer management – to build a fully functional product offering the fastest (could be a team event)
9. Service development – to build a functional service offering
10. Knowledge management – to deliver a decision support capability that provides the fastest access to process documentation in 5 real-time situations / events

Have your say. Which event have I clearly overlooked? For example, if we were to use the FCAPS model rather than eTOM, Accounting and Security are absent from the list above.

Any thoughts on who you think the gold medallists might be in each event?