Your OSS is either a catalyst for innovation or a roadblock to progress for your business.
The same strategies that built your OSS might now be the reason it’s slowing you down. If your OSS was built for yesterday’s challenges, the question is – will it be ready for tomorrow’s opportunities? Is it time to rethink your approach? Do you know where to start?
We recently touched on using the Re-framing Technique to plan out where your OSS might be in 5-10 years, not on the day after go-live (ie Wayne Gretzky’s “I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been.”). Today we’ll explore this further and leave you with an infographic / checklist at the end of the article for you to evaluate your own OSS environment.
Breaking Free from the OSS Status Quo: Where to Start
Modernising an OSS can feel overwhelming, especially when legacy systems are deeply embedded in daily operations. Trust, risk and fear are all major components of the OSS Buyer/Seller Chasm that can cause transformation delays. However, standing still is clearly not an option. Here’s how to determine whether your OSS is already holding you back and where to begin your transformation.
1. The first 3 questions to ask when determining whether your OSS is holding you back
Before making changes, assess your current system by asking:
- Is your OSS limiting business agility? Flexibility and adaptability are the key to a future-proof OSS. If launching new services, adapting to market shifts, or integrating new technologies feels slow and difficult, your OSS is likely a bottleneck.
- Is significant manual intervention is required? An efficient OSS should automate routine tasks, reducing reliance on manual processes. If your team is constantly troubleshooting OSS system / process failures or handling repetitive workflows, then integration and automation gaps are holding you back.
- Do you have your finger on the pulse of operational data / metrics? Does your OSS find it difficult to support interactive, real-time data exploration or generate actionable insights? Traditional OSS designs rely on rigid business logic and pre-defined rules, often limited to siloes of data. Modern operations demand the ability to interact with data iteratively and across multiple domains (as defined in the diagram below), making dynamic adjustments rather than being constrained by hard-coded processes. Generative AI techniques are showing signs of chipping away at OSS that are built on hard-coded logic and replacing them with data-driven insight discovery.
2. The 4 Common barriers that prevent organisations from modernising their OSS—and how to overcome them
Despite recognising the need for change, many companies struggle with OSS evolution due to being:
- Held back by the many Facets of Fear (career risk, system / network disruption, ability to deliver, etc, etc) – Upgrading an OSS can seem risky, but the “If It Ain’t Broke, Don’t Fix It” mindset can be an easy form of fear-based procrastination. If you ticked any of the three boxes in the previous section, your OSS might effectively be broken even if’s still operational. A close relative of fear is a lack of confidence. The process of transforming an OSS (the build phase) and the skills required are vastly different to operating an OSS (the run phase). If your team has only ever been involved in the run phase, using existing OSS tools, then conducting a transformation project can be daunting. We’d suggest you bring in experts familiar with OSS transformations to guide you, but of course we’re going to suggest that because this is one of PAOSS’s main market offerings, not to mention “Mastering Your OSS,” the book we wrote to help clients navigate their OSS transformations!
- Paralysed by cost concerns – While modernisation requires investment, the costs of inefficiency and lost opportunities are often far greater. But this can take quite a bit of analysis – firstly, to understand what price-brackets are likely to apply to build your new solution, and then to quantify future benefits that will support your cost-benefit analysis and ROI. Our Inverted Pyramid approach helps you to collect progressively more accurate pricing during the vendor/product selection process, whilst our OSS Business Case Builder can help to turn the intangibles into the tangibles necessary to create a compelling business case
- Bamboozled by complexity, especially rigid business logic, siloed stacks and legacy architectures – Many OSS environments were built with heavy pre-defined logic and static workflows – some baked into the products, some built through customisation to make the OSS fit the unique needs of the business. These make it difficult to react quickly to new network demands or business changes. Meanwhile, custom / proprietary legacy integrations often create vendor lock-in and slow innovation. Heavily customised legacy solutions often require untangling before the replacement steps can occur. There’s also the common problem of data siloes – where data sources and flows are incomplete or disconnected. There’s no single perfect solution to help overcome these variety of challenges. The solution is nuanced – more like a game of chess, starting with your opening gambit and strategy, then slowly plotting your way through the game to overcome the many challenges that arise
- Resistant to Change (eg internal skills gaps and a change-averse culture) – People, not just technology, are a foundational piece of any OSS transformation. Internal teams often resist change due to fear of the unknown, lack of training, job security fears, or cultural inertia (amongst many other factors). Many OSS transformation projects see change management as a 2 week training course in the week before go-live. Nothing could be further from the truth. Change management needs careful planning from the outset of each OSS transformation project. We like to use the Kotter’s 8-step change framework, but other techniques such as ADKAR are also widely used.
3. Transformation Planning – Minimising disruption
By their very nature, OSS transformations are quite disruptive – from the dual-allocation of staff to work on project and BAU (business as usual) activities, to changing work practices and much more. We tackle this from two main perspectives:
- Modular work breakdown
- Friction reduction
Modular work breakdown – One of the biggest influences on the success of a transformation can be traced back to the breakdown of work. Traditional “waterfall” or “big-bang” OSS transformations tended to take many months or even years before they’d deliver any tangible business value to the network operator. This introduces a variety of challenges, not least the lack of momentum a project team can demonstrate to stakeholders and sponsors.
Agile provided a framework to revisit how an OSS work breakdown is planned. It has a leaning towards the “small changes, regular release of business value” approach to an OSS evolution. A full OSS replacement is often not feasible, so the incremental improvements espoused by Agile can yield significant benefits. However, Agile can have other drawbacks, especially on complex, multi-domain transformations. This earlier post provides some insights into the different approaches to conducting the work breakdown on complex OSS Transformations. If you’re having trouble plotting a path through your complex OSS transformation project without causing massive disruptions or with shortened TTV (Time to Value), feel free to connect with us at PAOSS. We may be able to help you plan your project and generate the necessary project artefacts (implementation plans, business case, etc, etc).
Friction Reduction – OSS transformations and tools are beset with layer upon layer of friction, which we’ve summarised here:
Future-Proofing Your OSS: A Roadmap for Long-Term Success
A stagnant OSS is not just a technical issue—it’s a business risk. Speed of change is an important attribute of competitive advantage as arbitrage windows continue to shrink. Future-proofing requires a flexible and proactive approach to ensure your OSS remains an enabler of growth and competitive advantage, not a blocker.
4. How to make your OSS adaptable for future technologies without overhauling everything at once
The key to longevity is flexibility. A next-generation OSS must support new types of services and integrate with new networks, cloud platforms, AI models, and external data sources, all without requiring constant rewrites or overhauls. Here’s how to keep your OSS adaptable without major upheaval:
- Adopt a standardise and modular approach – Similar to the modular work breakdown listed above, we also wish to create a modular OSS/BSS stack that is as free of dependencies as possible. Instead of a complete system replacement, focus on upgrading individual components in a way that allows for gradual transformation. OSS modernisation can be seen as an ongoing process, not a one-off upgrade, so a long-term evolution strategy is required. Modern OSS must connect effortlessly with external systems, new technologies, and multi-vendor environments – typically via standardised interfaces such as Open APIs for third-party integrations
- Move away from static business rules – Instead of hard-coded decision logic, leverage APIs, data-driven insights and AI/ML/analytics-powered models that allow for real-time operational adjustments. With a more adaptable data-driven approach, self-optimising / self-healing feedback loops are to be encouraged
- Prioritise user empowerment – Ensure that operations teams, planners, and decision-makers can interact dynamically with the system, making immediate changes based on real-time data, reports, user-interfaces, etc rather than waiting for IT-driven updates. Ensure a mindset of action / decision-making, not just reporting / observation, is encouraged and built into the OSS systems, data and processes
5. The 5 essential pillars of a future-proof OSS
For long-term success, OSS must be built on five foundational elements:
- Agility – Ensure the OSS can support rapid service launches, dynamic operational changes, and seamless adaptation to shifting business priorities
- Scalability – Ensure the OSS can handle increasing (or even right-sizing of) workloads, data volumes, technology models and service models or service bundles
- Automation – When done well, automation reduces operational costs, enhances network performance, and minimises human error. However, automation can also be a constraint, especially when they’re static, rules-based automations. If there’s a change in the underlying network or systems, there’s a potential for rules-based systems to require remediation. Automation also extends to predictive maintenance to ensure system health measures are enacted before degradation occurs. Finally, this involves using algorithmic techniques to ensure cost and efficiency optimisation across operations, networks, systems and services
- Intuitive user interfaces – Empower users with dashboards that don’t just display data but allow for real-time intervention, such as reallocating staff, pushing network changes, and adjusting business priorities on the fly. Furthermore, many of the interfaces of the future are likely to be machine-to-machine (M2M) or human voice interfaces rather than human graphical user interfaces (GUI) of traditional OSS. No-code and low-code interfaces allow non-technical teams to configure workflows without deep programming knowledge
- Security – With OSS managing critical network functions and privileged data, security must be built-in, not a retrofitted bolt-on. This requires enforcement of strict access control and authentication for all OSS functions. It also requires end-to-end encryption techniques and compliance with privacy / cyber regulations
The Summary in an Infographic
What got your OSS to where it is today won’t keep it competitive in the future. Sticking with the same strategies risks stagnation, inefficiency, and lost opportunities. By taking small, strategic steps toward modernisation and prioritising flexible, user-driven decision-making, you can ensure your OSS remains a catalyst for innovation rather than a roadblock to progress.
