Our motto at Passionate About OSS is, “Removing complexity from OSS.”
Sadly, we’re awash with complexity in our industry. If most OSS were represented as a board game, they’d look something like this:
Image sourced from https://technabob.com
Would you know how to play this game without instructions? Even if you had instructions, it could take many months to master. I almost wonder whether this is a badge of honour for many in the industry? It means the special few (who have reached mastery level) can show off their prowess and become essential to the operational state of their telcos.
By contrast, when I think about some of our most impactful tech innovations in recent years, it’s not actually the technology that is so innovative per se. It’s been more about making complex technologies vastly more accessible to the masses. Their innovation has been in their user-friendliness.
Examples include:
None of these examples were the first of their kind. It’s just that their predecessors were less accessible.
We went from this:
To mass-market appeal with this:
The early MP3 players crammed in ever-more features as a means of differentiation (the blue arrow in the long-tail diagram below), but were clunky to use. The iPod focused on the essential features (the red-shaded box) and usability (the green arrow) instead.
How many OSS solutions do you know of that are adding as many new features as fast as possible out at the far right tip of the blue arrow?
By contrast, how many are differentiating by shifting focus to deliver less functionality (inside the red shading) and improved accessibility (green arrow)?
The telco world is having a massive problem with churn and shortening tenures of staff. Their OSS-facing workers are just not sticking around long enough to learn how to play our complex board games, let alone master them. Even if they did, the oft-cited tech skills shortage means we don’t have enough players to go around. Moreover, virtualisation, cloudification, automations and IT/telco convergence in general are actually making the games ever more complex at the OSS level. This represents significant business continuity risk for the telcos.
As a counterpoint to that risk, lies a big opportunity for OSS makers. It seems to me that we have two options. We can either:
There’s a big reason why I’ve been writing so many articles about technologies at the periphery of OSS in recent times (technologies such as AR/VR, low-code / no-code apps, 3D modelling, digital twins and generative AI). Not because they’re buzz-factors, but because they all represent platforms that can make our OSS (and related data) vastly more intuitive and immersive.
There’s friction everywhere we look in OSS, so there’s a skills-shortage. Only a tiny proportion of society wear suitable badges of honour to use our current OSS. To be truly revolutionary (for their traditional telco clients, but also for a broader client base) our OSS simply need to become more accessible.
If you believe we might be able to help you on this journey of OSS simplification, please connect.
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Here at Passionate About OSS, we are exactly that – Passionate About OSS (Operational Support Systems). We’re also passionate about BSS, NMS, or any other names you call the tools that help to operationalise your network.
