On July 4th, the United States of America celebrates its Independence Day. It is a day that recognizes the freedoms that the founding fathers of the United States wrote into the Declaration of Independence. As we remember this holiday and reflect on the freedoms that were expressed, we can draw some parallels to the current Operational Support System (OSS) landscape.
OSS emerged from the growing complexity of managing telecommunications infrastructures. Initially OSS focused on simplifying a specific aspect of the complexity. An example might be a system that detects faults with a particular piece of network equipment. As each of these systems were adopted they provide significant efficiencies. Those efficiencies also allowed networks to become even more complex, but offer more services and value.
As more services and values are offered from communications networks the demand for them has grown exponentially. And the OSS landscape has settled into a pattern of producing tools that provide more efficiencies to mitigate the increasing complexity. In contrast more services and technologies are introducing new complexities. This cycle of increasing complexity, new OSS tools decreasing complexity, and then new services and technologies beginning the cycle again has been a pattern for many years.
As more and more OSS has been layered into managing communications networks even the systems themselves have become a part of the complexity cycle. In Mapcom’s experience to break from these cycles and lower their peaks and troughs, telecommunications network providers can use the following four freedoms of OSS.
The Freedom of Open Integration
OSS tools should provide programmatic interfaces to allow exchange of data between OSS and BSS tools.
The Freedom from Duplicate Efforts
OSS tools should at their core simplify complexities and increase efficiencies by eliminating the duplication of data entry efforts
The Freedom of Open Data
OSS tools are meant to be a repository of critical business data and access to the data for backup, transfer to other systems, use in analytics systems should be open for retrieval from the OSS.
The Freedom of Open Process Flows
OSS tools simplify existing processes but they should adapt to specific process requirements of the telecommunications departments that are using the OSS.
When telecommunications providers adopt OSS tools with these four freedoms, they can adapt to new services more quickly. Additionally, they can implement new OSS tools and change processes to meet their current challenges. These capabilities are critical for service providers operating in the current telecommunications industry.
If you interested in hearing more about OSS tools that reinforce these freedoms, then please contact us to discuss your need to declare your OSS freedom. Have a happy 4th!