There’s a particular carrier that I know quite well that appears to despise a particular OSS vendor… but keeps coming back to them… and keeps getting let down by them… but keeps coming back to them. And I’m not just talking about support of their existing OSS, but whole new tools.
It never made sense to me… until reading Seth Godin’s blog today. In it, he states, “…this market segment knows that things that are too good to be true can’t possibly work, and that’s fine with them, because they don’t actually want to change–they simply want to be able to tell themselves that they tried. That the organization they paid their money to failed, of course it wasn’t their failure. Once you see that this short-cut market segment exists, you can choose to serve them or to ignore them. And you can be among them or refuse to buy in”
It starts to makes sense. The same carrier has a tendency to spend big money on the big-4 consultants whenever an important decision needs to be made. If the big, ambitious project then fails, the carrier’s project sponsors can say that the big-4 organization they paid their money to failed.
Does that ring true of any telco you’ve worked with? That they don’t actually want to change–they simply want to be able to tell themselves that they tried (or be seen to have tried) with their OSS transformation?
Are we actually stuck in one big dilemma? Are our OSS transformations actually so hard that they’re destined to fail, yet are already failing so badly that we desperately need to transform them? If so, then Seth’s insightful observation gives the appearance of progress AND protection from the pain of failure.
Not sure about you, but I’ll take Seth’s “refuse to buy in” option and try to incite change.
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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.
