Investigating the feasibility of open development of operations support solutions

The telecommunications operations support systems supply chain must address many stakeholders: R&D, product and requirements management, purchasing, systems integration, systems administration and users. While the management of next generation networks and services poses significant technical challenges, the present supply chain, market configuration, and business practices of the OSS community are an obstacle to rapid innovation. Forums for open development could potentially provide a medium to shorten this supply chain for the deployment of workable systems. This paper discusses the potential benefits and barriers to the open development of OSS for the telecommunications industry. It proposes the use of action research to execute a feasibility study into the open development of OSS software solutions within an industry wide open OSS project.