“I feel the need. The need for speed.”
You’re probably already familiar with the link and quote above. This famous line comes from Tom Cruise’s character, Maverick, in the movie, Top Gun. However, the line also represents the sense of urgency that carriers expect from their modern OSS and BSS solutions. Speed is an important factor for telcos, whether relating to the network performance, the delivery of new products to market, the activation of customer services and more.
Have you ever had that experience where you have an annoying little stone in your shoe, but you keep on walking because it's more of a pain to stop and remove it? But it keeps on niggling you regardless?
Have you had a similar experience with your OSS and/or BSS? Have there been little things about your OSS / BSS that annoy you, but not enough for you to do anything about it? Not enough to initiate a change or worse, a transformation project?
Service fulfillment is one of the most vital workflows that exist for any telco. It’s the process that turns prospects into paying customers. It’s the process that gains a return on all that capital a telco has tied up in their network investments. It’s the process that ensures the telco makes a good first impression on the customer. It’s a process that is run many, many times each day so the efficiency of the process will have a significant impact on determining the efficiency of the entire organisation.
OSS and BSS solution architects go to great pains to design and build data ETL (Extract, Transform, Load) pipelines. There’s in-depth engineering that goes into it, from considering the various sources of data and the plumbing to move data around to wherever it’s needed in the overall solution.
Scott Carey, in his article on InfoWorld, poses the question, “Now, with many vendors focusing on managed services and abstraction, the pendulum appears to be swinging the other way. After the great fragmentation, are we due a great consolidation?”
Henry Ford once said, “Don’t find fault, find a remedy; anybody can complain.”
The question to ask yourself is whether your existing network management solutions are complainers? In other words, do they just state the problems they find, or are they actually helping you to find a remedy to the many problems that arise in operational networks?
Operations Support Systems (OSS) collect a lot of data across many different areas of interest including, but certainly not limited to:
This article is a story about human ingenuity and the enormous achievements of humanity. In part relating to the inventiveness of OSS, but also by drawing comparisons to the exploration of space.
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