Networked data delivers faster insights for telcos

The telecommunications industry is perhaps the most data-rich business sector in the world. Yet, despite holding vast volumes of data, it can sometimes struggle to gain insights in areas as diverse as product development through to network management. The challenge is not about having the data but in making it accessible to gain customer insights quickly and cost-effectively.

The data within telco systems is typically split across multiple systems — there are billing systems, product management platforms, data warehouses and a variety of other critical applications that ensure the reliability of everything from customer service through to network availability. Being able to bring those disparate data sources together for a true single view of the customer has been a challenge Australian telcos have been trying to overcome for decades.

A flawed assumption

At the heart of the problem is one flawed assumption. In order for data to be analysed it all had to be in one central location. This resulted in complex and costly projects that extracted data from multiple sources, transformed it so that the data from different places could fit into a cohesive single database and then loaded it into the database. But despite the cost and complexity, it never delivered telcos what they really wanted — a single view of all their data.

Extract, transform and load (ETL) never delivered on its promise. Because of the cost and complexity, many datasets were omitted and adding new data resulted in expensive projects that took so long to deliver the desired outcome that the data was often no longer needed and vastly out of date.

A new approach

A new approach to accessing data for fast decision-making at a fraction of the cost of traditional data warehousing projects has emerged as a game changer. This new approach to data access is a networked data platform. This uses metadata to identify data sources and how the data from different sources can be joined. For example, a service representative might be answering a call from a customer requiring information from several different systems to be queried and synthesised. A decentralised data platform uses the rules set by the business owner and business-aware AI to access the required data so that the representative can be armed with the right information in real time.

A key application of this is to display a single view of all relevant data about that customer’s current issue or question. This could include network usage, billing history and even work with a machine learning-powered recommendation engine to provide advice on whether the customer is on the best service plan to meet their needs. The networked data platform stitches data together and analyses it in real time using AI to bring simplicity and efficiency to complex decision support.

Rather than having to extract that data, transform it and load it into a single system, the data is sent in real time to the analytics tool which pulls it together into a coherent view at a speed never achievable before, with far less complexity and cost.

With this approach, the time, effort and resources needed to add new data sources is vastly reduced from the traditional ETL model. New data sources can be added in hours or days rather than months or longer.

Telecommunications is a complex business that relies on access to vast quantities of data. A new approach eschews the old ETL process and leverages the expertise of data owners and a networked data platform to deliver faster customer insights, unlock competitive advantage and enable greater innovation at a lower cost. Every function from network planning to customer service can take advantage of faster access to information that enables better and faster decision-making.

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