Operations Support Systems (OSS) collect a lot of data across many different areas of interest including, but certainly not limited to:
- Network / Resource Inventory - physical and logical, inside plant and outside plant, configurations and attributes
- Service Inventory – orders, order parameters and resources
- Network / Service Assurance – network health metrics and service health metrics
- Workflows – process flows, activity types, rules and dependencies
- Network Capacity – network performance metrics and network traffic flows
- Financial / Commercial – Profitability, Product performance, Revenues and Expenditures, Asset utilisation
- Customer Interactions – Orders, bundles, reports, notifications, bills and more
It seems that networks and OSS/BSS tools are making even more data points available. Or perhaps it’s just the falling cost of storage that makes it cost-feasible to store increasing amounts of data. The challenge is less in collection of data, although that can definitely be a challenge, but more in how to make use of it.
As Derek Sivers stated, “If more information was the answer, then we’d all be billionaires with perfect abs.”
For the billionaires and perfectly sculpted individuals, it’s their ability to filter, connect and collate data uniquely; but more importantly then use these insights to drive the actions that give desirable outcomes and thus, differentiate them from the rest of the envious population.
Whilst some OSS experts might be seeking to become billionaires with perfect abs, they are only an analogy for the goals of our OSS tools and the customers that invest in them. The equivalent of money and muscles for OSS are operational efficiency, speed of delivery / repair, cost optimisation and increasing their own brand value.
Some OSS and BSS are fantastic at showing data. Lots and lots of data. Some OSS user interfaces are seemingly designed to show off all the data points that they collect. Whilst impressive, this can also make them difficult to use. They arguably make them complex as a proxy for capability. Instead, we prefer to filter, connect and collate to create insights that drive actions.
You’ll clearly notice that the list of dot-points above can’t be used to drive actions, not directly at least. Those dot-points don’t directly create the OSS equivalent of billionaires or abs. Yet, it’s these types of dot-points that we commonly see requested.
Of course we can assist with all those dot-points too, but our OSS tools have been developed around end-to-end workflows. Workflows that drive actions such as:
- Network Planning – not just giving you the tools to design the network manually, but to help auto-design and identify optimal design options based on whatever your most important criteria are (eg implementation cost, speed to deliver, network efficiency such as lowest number of hops)
- Smart Service Designer – providing catalog-driven, dynamic and automated creation of service execution plans to improve re-use, whilst flexibly coping with in-flight service order changes
- Network Roll-out Management – integrating the steps of network life-cycle to speed up network roll-out, reduce CAPEX, coordinate resources and increase repeatability of roll-out processes
- Network Configuration – reducing the workload of network planning and engineering departments by facilitating alternative network configuration plans / routing, tools to optimise resource dimensioning and quickly adjusting to changing traffic conditions
- End-to-end customer life-cycle management via Billing and CRM and built-in integration to Service Order Management, Network / Resource Inventory and Service Fulfilment
Ultimately, it’s these workflow-inspired actions that drive business efficiency and cost optimisation.
Actions and outcomes, not just the collection of data points.
