017 - Leading Global OSS/BSS Transformation through Collaboration, with George Glass

Our OSS and BSS are highly complex by nature. However, we seem to do a great hob of making them more complex, more challenging, less repeatable and hence, more difficult to change. Perhaps that caters to our deeper desires - so many of us in this industry love to prove our worth by solving complex problems

Our guest on this episode, George Glass, has spent a career looking for ways to remove complexity and increase re-use in our OSS/BSS stacks. First during 31 years (to the day) working as a developer, architect and executive at BT. Now at TM Forum, where he's CTO and continuing to carry the flame of next generation architectural concepts like ODA and the Open API initiative that started when George was still at BT.

George walks us through a career that started with cutting code on BT's NMS solutions and the charging systems that allowed BT to drive (significant) revenue. He talks us through very early separation of charging, taking it away from mainframes and onto Unix server farms. He also discusses how he was instrumental in the development of BT's SOA (Service Oriented Architecture) in circa 2008-9 that generated over £300M in cost-benefit for BT and remains in use (in a modified form) to this day. He also discusses how BT's structural separation to form Openreach had architectural ramifications and learnings tht propagated to other carrier environments around the world.

George then goes on to talk about the origins of TM Forum's modern flagship architectural models and how they're assisting their members with digital transformations globally. Not just telcos and their supporting vendors / partners / integrators, but also across other industries (including George's favourite, the automotive industry).

For any further questions you may have, George can be found at: www.linkedin.com/in/george-glass-887ba61

Disclaimer. All the views and opinions shared in this podcast, and others in the series, are solely those of our guest and do not reflect the opinions or beliefs of the organisations discussed.