The Chicken or the Egg – OSS/BSS or Market Change – Which to Reboot First?

Telcos have tolerated lengthy OSS/BSS rollouts as a necessary evil for years, but what if those same systems are the chains holding the telco world back. Which is the chicken and which is the egg? Is it OSS/BSS and/or the market that needs a radical reboot? Which must be rebooted first?

OSS and BSS are deeply linked with telco business models. As you’ll see from the chart below, OSS and BSS are facilitators of almost every part of a network operator’s business. Not just the tech-related parts of the business, but everything. I was going to say non-tech, but the reality is that telcos are so dependent on their digital systems that every part of the business could be described as tech-centric. They’re e-businesses at a massive scale.

This interesting article by Sebastian Barros suggests that the mobile model is broken and there are five foundational aspects to it:

1. Being digital-first and highly user-friendly
2. The need for deep personalisation at scale
3. Legacy trap of big waterfall transformation roadmaps
4. Being customer centric, not product-centric
5. Network as a commodity (not a utility but essential infra)

Broken indeed, or as we like to say:

Telco services have never been more essential, but telco business models have never been more broken.

As per the chart above, OSS/BSS are so inextricably linked that they could be your telco’s oppressor or saviour.

Depending on how we implement, they can either be sources of great power and competitive advantage. Or they can wield destruction and carnage that curtail a network operator for years to come.

So, let’s look into this a bit deeper, through Sebastian’s five lenses shall we?

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Flaw 1: Clunky User Experiences

Despite living in an era of swipe-to-apply, one-click checkouts and immediate response in other industries, many network operators still provide clunky system interfaces and manual hand-offs just to change a plan or activate a new service. Internally, multiple teams juggle spreadsheets or manually wrestle with long process fall-out queues. Externally, customers wait in call-centre or get pushed onto digital self-service channels (eg FAQ pages) that don’t resolve their problems. Internally or externally, these examples are a recipe for churn.

Why OSS/BSS worsens the crisis:

• Customer frustration accumulates even before Day 1 of onboarding and never truly abates
• Support costs balloon as simple tasks require human intervention
• Brand perception suffers when telcos trail behind other industry offerings in usability

How OSS/BSS can help:

• Streamline UI/UX/CX and aggressively attack friction points across all user journeys. Refer to the Friction Continuums and the UI/UX/CX Audit Framework below
• Increase modularity (eg allow product teams to iterate front-end features independently of core OSS/BSS releases)
• Builds an innovation sandbox and red/blue release models where new UX experiments prove value before deeper systems change
• Channel Lightning McQueen in every aspect of what we do:

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Flaw 2: Personalisation at Scale

Customers have come to expect ever-greater levels of personalisation, in other industries, or at least the perception of massive personalisation. OSS/BSS have always allowed telcos to deliver repeatability at massive scale. The origins of OSS/BSS can be directly tied back to this need. Telcos are now expected to go even further, to deliver the feel of a bespoke experience at massive scale. Yet systems and network data pools remain siloed, blocking a unified view of customer behaviour. The result? Personalisation efforts are reactive at best and often miss the moment of opportunity. Or they make users feel like they’re being herded into approaches that best suit the needs of the carrier, not the user.

Why OSS/BSS worsens the crisis:

• New offers take months / years to spin up
• There are too many offer variables that a prospect must select from that are meaningful to operators (eg network device configurations) that are meaningless to the prospect
• Due to manual interventions, promotions reach customers after they’ve already churned
• There is no correlation between performance issues and high-value users due to telemetry blind spots
• Marketing waste: mass campaigns spray-and-pray rather than target those most likely to convert

How OSS/BSS can help:

• Reduce offer complexity and only give users choices that are meaningful to them. Abstract and default for variables the users don’t care about. Refer to the Pyramid of Pain below
• Unify CRM, network and support data in a single real-time platform
• Trigger contextual upsell or retention offers the moment thresholds are crossed
• Dynamic charging that adjusts rates based on network congestion, loyalty status or competitor moves
• Instant alerts for usage thresholds, enabling on-the-spot upgrades or bundle suggestions
• Holistic dashboards that fuse network KPIs, support tickets and revenue impact for a 360° customer view

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Flaw 3: Big Transformations

Legacy OSS/BSS projects often span two to three years, culminating in monolithic “big bangs” that deliver yesterday’s roadmaps and strain budgets. By the time go-live arrives, market conditions have shifted, regulatory requirements evolved and customer expectations soared – rendering the entire effort obsolete.

Why OSS/BSS worsens the crisis:

• There’s a focus on adding features, creating a Frankenstein UI/UX
• Technical debt accrues faster than ever, poisoning future initiatives
• Multi-year overhaul projects lock in outdated requirements before delivery
• Monolithic codebases require long test cycles for every change
• Waterfall processes prevent rapid adaptation to shifting market needs and get bogged down in major dependencies (eg hardware procurement cycles)
• Large-scale upgrades incur high risk and cost overruns
• Teams become disengaged by slow progress and repeated delays

How OSS/BSS can help:

• Modern development methodologies allow development teams to rapidly iterate. Agile is just one piece of this strategy, but it can be easy to get lost in the Agile backlog. Refer to Using WBS (Work Breakdown Structures) to develop a plan on a page visualisation (seeing the forest) rather than a backlog (being lost for the trees) below
• Focus on building a work breakdown that aims to reduce dependencies. Refer to Alternative Ways to Slice and Dice an OSS/BSS programme of work below
• Understand what truly moves the needle for you internal users and customers. Refer to The Long-Tail Analysis (Backlog Audit) technique below
• Building a culture of “subtracting the suck” not just adding new features endlessly
• Shifting to a containerised, modular OSS/BSS stack underpinned by continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipelines enables:
• Incremental releases of capability slices
• Rapid rollbacks and canary deployments that minimise blast radius for experimental features

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Flaw 4: Product-Centric vs Customer-Centric Processes

When roadmaps prioritise technical milestones over user outcomes, teams build features that look good on slide decks but fail to move the NPS needle. Imagine spending months perfecting a new reporting dashboard that no one outside IT ever opens. This is a classic sign that product obsession has eclipsed customer empathy.

Why OSS/BSS worsens the crisis:

• Misaligned incentives see technical teams rewarded for uptime, not delight
• Transactions are measured within each silo, not end-to-end or across all channels, so they don’t measure the true customer experience
• Slow incident prioritisation leaves high-value subscribers waiting
• Feature bloat obscures focus on the few capabilities that truly matter
• Development backlogs prioritise easy-to-build features over user pain points
• Incident triage ignores subscriber value, delaying fixes for high-value customers
• Feedback loops from NPS or support tickets aren’t integrated into workflow

How OSS/BSS can help:

• Aim to develop a customer experience that is so great and/or so novel that it is worthy of inspiring word-of-mouth conversations. Refer to Purple Cow Design below
• Focus on Friction-Point Reduction rather than adding features that simply bloat the user experience. Refer to The Long-Tail Analysis (Backlog Audit) technique below
• Embedding end-to-end customer experience metrics directly into OSS/BSS workflows to measure (and manage) every stage of the customer journey and service lifecycle
• Incident alerting becomes weighted by subscriber value, with VIP or business accounts fast-tracked
• Development backlogs integrate NPS trends and ticket sentiment so features solve actual pain points
• Operational dashboards display combined technical and business KPIs, holding teams accountable for end-to-end experience. Also design dashboards that highlight the linkage between technical / back-end operational KPIs with the KPIs that measure how successful the business is

Deeper Dive Example
Closed-loop assurance often begins with simple automation: for instance, when a high-severity alarm hits an SLA breach for a top-tier customer, an automated workflow opens a ticket, notifies the account manager and triggers a personalised apology SMS / email. Over time, these workflows evolve to include churn-risk scoring and proactive outreach campaigns, embedding customer obsession into the OSS/BSS DNA.

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Flaw 5: Network Treated as Commodity

Treating connectivity as undifferentiated gigabyte blocks traps telcos in ruthless price battles, a strategy that cannibalises margins and erodes brand value. It ignores the fact that modern networks can do far more than move bits.

It overlooks the broader role a modern network can play in people’s digital lives, such as:

• Providing secure identity verification
• Preserving user privacy
• Enforcing robust security controls at the infrastructure level
• Guaranteeing performance for critical applications
• Enabling trusted data exchanges between devices and services
• and much more

Isn’t it time we stopped selling raw data and started delivering the foundational services that underpin tomorrow’s digital economy?

Why OSS/BSS worsens the crisis:

• Margin collapse as competitors cannibalise each other on price alone
• Ecosystem stasis when developers have no means to integrate network capabilities
• Undifferentiated offerings that fail to capitalise on telco-specific strengths. For example, OSS stacks lack standard APIs for network functions like QoS or location
• Billing engines built for gigabyte buckets can’t monetise advanced services, dynamic pricing, personalised experiences, etc
• Long-tail innovators face closed-box platforms with no programmable access to innovate with
• Price-only competition erodes margins without offering differentiation

How OSS/BSS can help:
By cataloguing network functions, from traffic prioritisation and key digital experience enablers (eg identity and location look-ups), operators can:

• Enable third-party innovation via developer portals, hackathons and partner programmes
• Forge B2B ecosystems for IoT, smart-city projects or enterprise-grade SLAs
• Expose programmable network functions via secure, northbound APIs
• Meter and bill new services such as low-latency channels or identity look-ups
• Offer developer portals with self-service access to network-as-a-service primitives
• Enable flexible charging models (per-API call, per-slice subscription or tiered bundles)
• Foster B2B ecosystems by cataloguing network capabilities for partner innovation
• Monetise premium features (e.g. low-latency channels for gaming or AR/VR)

The shift to network APIs requires careful design of rate-limiting, authentication and usage-monitoring layers so that each call is metered and billed accurately. It also demands new commercial models, such as pay-per-API-call or subscription tiers for slice sizes, that align revenue to value rather than bytes consumed.

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Acknowledging the Differences: Transformation for Tier 1 and Tier 2+

The challenge with some of the examples cited above is that they can require significant investment of resources. Whereas T1 operators often have large teams of developers at hand to make their own solutions or customisations, T2+ operators are often more resource constrained.

Tier 1 operators can adopt a more customised, partner-driven strategy:

• Front-door innovation – spin up API-first self-service layers for rapid customer wins and mandate compliance with standards such as Open API
• Back-office overhaul – fund multiple agile pods to refactor core OSS/BSS modules simultaneously
• Develop in-house platforms to give greater control of workflows / data-flows and user experiences

Tier 2 operators may need to adopt a more phased, supplier-driven strategy:

• Greater utilisation of out-of-the-box (OOTB) solutions and their native API stacks
• Managed SaaS offerings – launch digital experiences without large internal teams
• Incremental core refactoring – choose the highest-impact module and modernise via vendor accelerators
• Highly Targeted Customisation – either in providing the glue between OOTB and open-source modular solutions or creating solutions such as user portals in areas where competitive advantage can be created
• Greater pragmatism, work-arounds and reduced system complexity

Both paths start with quick-win market initiatives that build momentum and funding for deeper OSS/BSS re-architecture.

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What Next?

At PAOSS, we specialise in guiding telcos and vendors through these transformation challenges with a suite of tailored services and techniques:

1. The Friction Continuums

We use the friction continuum audits to evaluate and improve customer experiences

2. The UI/UX/CX Audit Framework

Whether anyone likes to admit it or not, in my experience buyers often do judge the OSS book by its cover, or the solution by its UI. A poorly designed or complex UI can lead to rejection as being outdated, even if the solution is actually modern and feature-rich but with poor visual appeal. Moreover, a poorly designed UX/CX can lead to operator inefficiency and end-customer dissatisfaction.

Put simply, UI/UX/CX excellence is lacking across almost the entire OSS/BSS industry. We use the following framework to assess and suggest optimisation opportunities.

3. The Pyramid of Pain

We understand that there are up-stream decisions that can drastically increase the complexities experienced by back-office teams and systems. In turn, these complexities impact customer experiences and efficiency of operations

4. Using WBS (Work Breakdown Structures) to develop a Project plan on a page

We’ve developed the Transformation Project Framework (TPF) in conjunction with the TM Forum to help visualise complex OSS/BSS transformations in a single view (seeing the forest) rather than getting lost in an extensive backlog of activities (being lost for the trees).

At the highest level, every type of transformation can be classified into five key facets:

The concept of WBS is an important part of then breaking this down further, as shown in the sample below. We can even use this framework to generate key project artefacts, including RACI tables, effort estimates, cost estimates and even tickets of work ready for importing into your Agile platform of choice.

5. Alternative Ways to Slice and Dice a Programme of Work

The waterfall model of the past is prone to risks, delays and a spider-web of dependencies.

Instead, we aim to use a variety of ways to break the chains of dependency and deliver value faster and more regularly throughout a transformation project.

6. The Long-Tail Analysis (Backlog Audit) Technique

We find that this technique helps to highlight where the development team’s focus is – towards the right end of the blue arrow that isn’t moving the needle, or refactoring and improving the essential functionality / experiences / workflows within the red-shaded box. It also helps with reframing exercises to identify where refactoring isn’t enough and entirely new ways of thinking are required to reinvent solutions.

7. How to Make your OSS/BSS a Purple Cow

We use the Purple Cow technique described by Seth Godin as follows:

“Purple Cow describes something phenomenal, something counterintuitive and exciting and flat-out unbelievable… Seth urges you to put a Purple Cow into everything you build, and everything you do, to create something truly noticeable.”

What if your OSS looked a bit more like this command centre concept from Rolls Royce? Would this be noteworthy? A purple cow that you’d tell others about??

You can read more about these and the other types of audits we provide. Techniques designed to help clients improve on the foundational aspects of a telco business model described above.

Whether you’re a Tier 1 operator with in-house scale or a Tier 2 that relies on OOTB solutions, PAOSS has the frameworks, accelerators and expertise to evaluate then help optimise the effectiveness of your OSS/BSS. Leave us a note if you’d like to find out more about any of the frameworks described above.