CASE STUDY OF BIG DATA & DATA ANALYTICS

BENEFITING FROM BIG DATA, A NEW APPROACH FOR THE TELECOM INDUSTRY

OBJECTIVE

How much can companies in the telecommunications industry benefit from “big data”? That’s a critical question. Every operator is searching for new ways to increase revenues and profits during a time of stagnant growth in the industry, but few have demonstrated the capabilities needed to make the most of this new technology. That’s why operators are seeking to make initial inroads with big data, which sets up a business problem to be solved and then seeks out the data that might solve it.

Big Data emerges can form the basis for more efficient operations and more effective marketing. It also can give operators a  more complete, transparent view of customers, enabling new and  more profitable ways of capturing and retaining them.

PROBLEMS

·         Track performance  and active users of mobile data services

The more critical mobile data services have become to the business. The virtues of big data have been touted in hundreds of articles and reports during the past few years. Indeed, some analysts already see a considerable level of disillusionment regarding big data. It is an umbrella term encompassing the new methods and technologies for collecting, managing, and analyzing in real time the vast increase in both structured and unstructured data, because too many efforts to implement the technology have not lived up to the high expectations triggered by the hype.

·         Centralize information to make large amounts of data easy to access and utilize

Everything was decentralized. Telecom industry has lots of requests coming to the operations teams but the industry couldn’t go to a single system to get this information in a reliable and consistent way.

·         Single KPI report required major assistance from IT

The reporting team delivered only one standard, consolidated Key Performance Indicator (KPI) report per month, the compilation of which relied on the involvement of the IT department, from operations personnel to some of the development team who understood how the tools worked.

SOLUTION IDEA

To solve this problem, companies should begin with the inverse approach, viewing the opportunity from the bottom up. In this case, the telecom industry should examine the data currently available, and then determine the business problems. The data might help to solve these problems with the help of any additional structured or unstructured data that might be needed. The best way to get started with this approach is through pilot programs. Keeping initial expectations reasonable, a dedicated team to gather all available data, analyze it to allow new and unexpected opportunities to reveal, and then test the efficacy of the results in solving one or more real business problems. These tactics offer telecom operators and others  industries a concrete starting point, a more realistic assessment of the benefits of big data, and a better understanding of what is actually needed to achieve benefits for the long term.

METHODOLOGY

Most Big Data projects begin by defining a business problem to be solved, then trying to determine what data might solve it. These methodologies are run like traditional business intelligence programs, frequently achieving only incremental benefits. The bottom-up approach begins with the available internal and external data, and allows out-of-the-box opportunities to emerge. Big Data pilots demand speed, agility, and constant iteration if they are to achieve really new and surprising opportunities.

MODEL

Big data promises to promote growth and increase efficiency and profitability. They include:

·         Optimizing routing and quality of service by analyzing network traffic in real time

·         Analyzing call data records in real time to identify fraudulent behavior immediately

·         Allowing call center reps to flexibly and profitably modify subscriber calling plans immediately

·         Tailoring marketing campaigns to individual customers using location-based and social networking technologies

·         Using insights into customer behavior and usage to develop new products and services

Big data can even open up new sources of revenue, such as selling insights about customers to third parties.

MEASUREMENT

The essence of the bottom-up approach lies in gathering together all the data available to the operator, both internal and external, applying software tools to process, analyze, and make sense of it, and then determining what can be done with the results. Many types of data are potentially available to operators. It is unlikely that operators will have all these sources at this stage and certain sets of data might be combined to open up new business opportunities in areas such as campaign marketing and fraud prevention

·         Enhanced Recommendation Engine:

Operators could generate more accurate and personalized offer recommendations for existing individual subscribers by combining internal structured data

·         Improved Fraud Management:

By correlating internal location, usage, and account data with external sources such as credit reports, operators could significantly increase the detection of fraudulent activity such as looping or call forwarding on hacked

ACCURACY

The eventual goal of big data is to combine and correlate every information source to generate a holistic, transparent, end-to-end view of all the interactions every individual customer or household has with the operator. But to really leverage big data, operators must radically modify how they gather, verify, learn from, and make use of the information at their disposal.

Instead, operators must learn from companies such as Google and Facebook, where data is king, the Big Data pilot program should be made up of teams of people from all over the company including network operations, IT, product development, marketing, finance, and even customers.

Piloting teams need  to conduct numerous tests on the data, learn from their mistakes and false starts, and move to the next test. They must speed up the evolutionary process of development, allowing the fittest and most valuable results to emerge quickly.

EVALUATION

Big data offers telecom operators a real opportunity to gain a much more complete picture of their operations and their customers, and to further their innovation efforts. Big data demands of every industry is very different and unconventional approach to business development. The operators that can incorporate new agile strategies into their organizational DNA fastest will gain a real competitive advantage over their slower rivals.