Small companies “are uncluttered, simple informal. They thrive on passion and ridicule bureaucracy. Small companies grow on good ideas – regardless of their source. They need everyone, involve everyone, and reward or remove people based on their contribution to winning. Small companies dream big dreams and set the bar high – increments and fractions don’t interest them.”
Jack Welch.
This is the last quote of Welch-week, which analogises why big business should seek to build on the advantages of small business.
Quite clearly, the CSPs that implement OSS are often large, full of bureaucracy, lacking flexibility and resistant to change. Often their OSS demonstrate the same characteristics. Yet to be successful with an OSS project, the CSP (and vendor for that matter) needs to embrace the small company mindset that Welch discusses above.
Let’s take process flows as an example. Within a big Telco, processes have become bloated to handle all the different variations identified over the years. The CSP often thinks that they can just rebuild the old process flows into the new OSS. There are two reasons why this is not advisable in most cases:
- OSS will usually force a process to change because previous workflows often had vastly different management tools to work with (eg GUI designs, data entry fields, sequencing of activities, interfaces with other systems, etc)
- OSS will force major changes to the organisation, so why not take the opportunity to build fresh, simple processes that build on the essential aspects of the existing ones but de-clutter