Back in my early days of OSS, I knew there was soooo much to learn. As the signpost below suggests, as well as the OSS applications themselves, there were also adjacent / related fields like databases, networks, services, architecture, programming, and so much more. Pretty daunting!
But after a few years in the industry, I began to get a feel for the “lay of the land.” Whilst I didn’t exactly know where many of these given paths would take me, I generally had a sense of what the road ahead looked like. If I wanted to steer to a specific location on a distant mountain range, I felt like I had enough awareness of the terrain and the ability to learn / adapt along the way to reliably navigate from the current location to that far-off destination / transformation.
I don’t know if it’s just a case of traversing the bell-curve of the OSS midwit meme since, or that the technology options are proliferating so fast now, but I don’t always feel that same sense of navigational awareness today.
Let’s just look at the field of databases. When I first started out in OSS, it was basically just one flavour or another of a relational / SQL database. These days that field has split to also include time-series, graph, NoSQL, cloud storage, data lakes and many other variants. Databases are now a life’s-work / career / speciality in their own right. The same goes for infrastructure, which were previously very expensive on-prem compute/storage devices but now come in many different combinations. The same can also be said of many other OSS adjacencies.
To make matters worse (or better, depending on perspective), we’re now seeing newer technologies and methodologies like AI, immersive tech (AR/VR), UX, DX and so much more all providing evolutionary opportunities for OSS solutions.
In short, the further I go on this journey into the wilds of OSS, the more I realise it’s proliferating faster than I can keep up (although I do love the journey of discovery – it’s a job and a hobby all tied into one!).
Luckily, there’s something else really important that I’ve learned since those early days.
The power of the network. Not in the sense of routers and switches, but in establishing great relationships with so many of the wisened experts who work in OSS and its adjacent fields. It’s probably only in the last 10 years that the power of networks has truly dawned on me. Previously it was a case of narrowing the time, effort and focus on getting the immediate project done and moving on to the next one. In more recent times, I spend so much more time cultivating and maintaining relationships with the many brilliant people that make up our industry.
To draw on the study and visualisation of social networks (Structural Holes and Sociograms) it’s dawned on me that I want to be the red dot rather than any of the black dots in the diagram below. It’s not just the ability to draw on the experts within each cluster to help navigate the estate in front of me that’s important though. That’s certainly one vitally important reason. The other reason that red dot is so important is for its ability to bring otherwise disconnected clusters together. We’re finding that this is increasingly important in the work that we do at PAOSS.
Why is the latter so important? We’ve talked about the chasm that exists between buyers and sellers in a recent 6 article series (eg part 1) and how important it is for the telco / OSS industry to close the gap. As such, we’re now looking to do all we can to be master connectors for the industry – to bring buyers, sellers, investors, integrators, etc together. To help establish connections across people, projects, technologies, companies, ideas and more.
You’ll notice a renewed emphasis on connections in how we help clients:
If you’d like help in being connected, to find the best experts to help you navigate across the savannah of your OSS, to be referred to the best-fit people / companies / technologies / ideas to solve your OSS problems, etc, please leave us a note (via comments below or a direct message). We’d be delighted to find a way to help you.
[PS. Just as an interesting aside: I’ve recently been reading a book called “The Connector Effect.” It’s from the team of BNI (Business Networking International), a professional networking organisation renowned for its emphasis on referrals / connections. I attended a single BNI local chapter session 20+ years ago and deemed it pointless for me at the time because OSS is such a specific niche that 99.999999999999% of the world’s population would never have an awareness of, or direct need for, an OSS consultant. BNI seemed brilliant for local businesses like plumbers, lawyers, handymen, IT coaches, etc, but useless for anyone in OSS. Upon reading the book now, I’ve been shocked to realise that many of the principles of connection espoused by BNI took me another decade or more to learn and implement with PAOSS. Perhaps there’s an opportunity for the BNI equivalent specifically for the OSS world? Hmmm! Food for thought! ]
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