People pay for two things. What about OSS?

People pay for two things:
Results: You do something they couldn’t do for themselves.
Convenience: You do something they don’t want to do for themselves, or you make something difficult easier to do
.”
Ramit Sethi
.

I really like the way Ramit has broken down an infinite number of variants down to just two key categories. Off the top of my head, these categories of payment (ie perceived value) seem to hold true for most industries, but we can unpack how they align with OSS.

In traditional OSS, most of the functionality / capability we provide falls into the convenience category.

In assurance, we tend to act as aggregators and coordinators, the single pane of glass of network health and remedial actions such as trouble-ticketing. But there’s no reason why we couldn’t manage those alarms from our EMS and tickets through spreadsheets. It’s just more convenient to use an OSS.

In fulfilment, we also pull all the pieces together, potentially from a number of different systems ranging from BSS, inventory, EMS and more. Again, it’s just more convenient to use an OSS.

But looking into the future, with the touchpoint explosion, the sheer scale of events hitting our assurance tools and the elastic nature of fulfilment on virtualised networks means that humans can’t manage by themselves. OSS and high-speed decision support tools will be essential to deliver results.

One other slight twist on this story though. All of the convenience we try to create using our OSS can actually result in less convenience. If we develop 1,000 tools that, in isolation, do something they [our customers] don’t want to do for themselves, it adds value. But if those tools in aggregate slow down our OSS significantly, increase support costs (lifetime costs) and make them inflexible to essential changes, then it’s actually reducing the convenience. On this point I have a motto – Just because we can, doesn’t mean we should (build extra convenience tools into our OSS).

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