Two concepts to help ease long-standing OSS problems

There’s a famous Zig Ziglar quote that goes something like, “You can have everything in life you want, if you will just help enough other people get what they want.”

You could safely assume that this was written for the individual reader, but there is some truth in it within the OSS context too. For the OSS designer, builder, integrator, does the statement “You can have everything in your OSS you want, if you will just help enough other people get what they want,” apply?

We often just think about the O in OSS – Operations people, when looking for who to help. But OSS/BSS has the ability to impact far wider than just the Ops team/s.

The halcyon days of OSS were probably in the 1990’s to early 2000’s when the term OSS/BSS was at its most sexy and exciting. The big telcos were excitedly spending hundreds of millions of dollars. Those projects were huge… and hugely complex… and hugely fun!

With that level of investment, there was the expectation that the OSS/BSS would help many people. And they did. But the lustre has come off somewhat since then. We’ve helped sooooo many people, but perhaps didn’t help enough people enough. Just speak with anybody involved with an OSS/BSS stack and you’ll hear hints of a large gap that exists between their current state and a desired future state.

Do you mind if I ask two questions?

  1. When you reflect on your OSS activities, do you focus on the technology, the opportunities or the problems
  2. Do you look at the local, day-to-day activities or the broader industry

I tend to find myself focusing on the problems – how to solve them within the daily context on customer challenges, but the broader industry problems when I take the time to reflect, such as writing these blogs.

The part I find interesting is that we still face most of the same problems today that we did back in the 1990’s-2000’s. The same source of risks. We’ve done a fantastic job of helping many people get what they want on their day-to-day activities (the incremental). We still haven’t cracked the big challenges though. That’s why I wrote the OSS Call for Innovation, to articulate what lays ahead of us.

It’s why I’m really excited about two of the concepts we’ve discussed this week:

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