Data Analytics might be the "White Knight" for the beleaguered Service Provider

Martin, i think this is great post, full of insight and important thinking.   CSPs need to get more aggressive in dealing with the balancing act between consumer privacy, regulatory reform, and leveraging customer and usage information, in relationship with other information taxonomies.  Google and Facebook get a lot of public heat about their aggressiveness in pushing their own leverage against consumer privacy, but yet they do not have legacy regulatory restrictions to restrain them.  Clearly, the boundaries differ from one market and territory to another, but the boundaries need to be revisited by CSP creatively with their customers and experimentally with PR and regulatory risks that come with leveraging more information.

Most industries are moving more towards competing on the business of moving information, not just digital goods and services and the information technologies.  Market information is a digital good.  For communications, the assets we need to compete with to create value are no longer just network services and resources.

Stephen

Great post  - and discussions. I agree. There's so much to be gained by anayzing customer data - CSPs have so much of it, but it has been underutilized to date. Martin's point about using analytics to monetize mobile advertising is an example. CSPs know their customers - they can provide unique insights to potential advertisers. Sitting on a goldmine!  

Many CSPs analyze customer data to segment customers for marketing purposes - optimizing offers, supporting cross-sell and up-sell campaigns, predicting churn/implementing retention campaigns, etc.

I'd like to see more CSPs using analytics to improve the entire customer experience. Not just across fixed and wireless, but  the experience across billing, service, sales, etc. The customer experience isn't just about latency, after all.

Martin, you have nicely captured the opportunity open to the service provider.  The era of open innovation in mobile content is still young and many new business models will be tried. It no exaggeration to say that those new business models will succeed or fail based how effectively the operator uses business analytics.

The TMForum can play an important role in helping service providers seize the opportunity.  The intelligence gained from business analytics is a source of competitive advantage. In the days when the only threat to the service provider came from another service provider, it made sense to go it alone in designing and using analytics.  But service providers now face a common threat from over-the-top players.  Defining and promoting standard data models and best practices will speed adoption, lower costs, and reduce risks.  The TMForum Information Framework is a very good start in this direction.  

The forum can also offer leadership in establishing and promoting privacy practices that enable service providers to confidently leverage customer data without fear or reprisals or angering their customers.  Clearly service providers would prefer self-regulation to the imposition of regulations imposed by governments.  

Thanks for bringing this opportunity to the attention of the members.  

Good Point.  Just an additional direction of thought, Analysing the data is one aspect of the problem. How is that analysis  transformed/linked/related to marketable propositions to the advertisers and to customer is the key which service providers will need to understand.

What google was able to do successfully was to do just that - e.g. using the email content to generate the ads which are relevent . Analytics is definitly part of it but pacakaging and dynamic ,instant availability of offer to customer was the key in my view

What service providers are not able to do is to make their products and packages targeted in the way Over the top companies are doing. There have been attempts at dynamic pricing kind of initiative but there is a lot more "inventiveness"  in packaging offers and dynamic presentations of the same

As the Revenue Management Initiative now ramps up its several areas of specialized activity, the broader ranging group working on Data Analytics will provide the bridge between the critical information elements identified in such areas as Fraud Management, Revenue Assurance, Billing and Supply Chain to link to those "critical few" C-level relevant business metrics that allow the lean value stream management practices to yield the desired business results.

For those of you interested in contributing to this effort, Ian Emsley is leading the Data Analytics team for the Revenue Management Initiative.  Check in with his group at the Online Community to see how you can participate.

Martin , don't you think that BI and related technologies which are meant for analysis , have been less value in telecom.. i think it's high time to start looking at price simulation tool, offer simulation tool or may be some similar tools....

Thanks for the very important discussion.This is indeed a great opportunity. However, service providers have not stepped up to it yet. I don't think it's a matter of technology - there's plenty of technology. The key issue holding back service providers is their concern about laws, rules,regulations, and privacy concerns - both real and imaginary. It's not a matter of data model either. Technology, data models, and smart ways to use/leverage the data are going to all be required - but they are not the key barrier. The key barrier is this issue of how to overcome privacy/regulatory/legal concerns.

If the TMF is to do something, it should help overcome the key constraining factor. It should help clarify this matter and establish practices that can work + demonstrations that they do work in the various geographies, and are acceptable. We might want to initiate work to formulate "Practical Policies in Leveraging of Information by Service Providers". Each word here is important.

However, at this stage, service providers are still moving way too slowly, despite years of debating the issue.

Good debate.  

When I have these kinds of discussions with CSPs it becomes apparent that there's a hierarchy of needs here and different CSPs / groups within a CSP are at very different places in the hierarchy.  At the bottom of the hierarchy is just "getting at the data" and towards the top are the more advanced analytics functions that are implied in this thread -- propensities, etc.

I agree that technology is not the hurdle -- rather the problem is getting the data out of departmental silos.  This is sometimes due to regulatory concerns but equally often it's just due to legacy systems, bad data, ... -- very basic issues.

IMO we need to paint a clear path up the hierarchy so that we dont lose the CSPs interest -- too often the goals seem unattainable.

I really like the phrase "Practical Policies in Leveraging of Information by Service Providers" -- right on!

Do I hear any volunteers?

It's great to see such a rich discussion around analytics here. I agree that  analytics offer great promise for improving customer experience and in fact overall profitability. That's why it's the focus of our next Insights report.

It's not just about the sexy topics like web analytics either. Leaders like Google, Amazon and Netflix are all known for those, but all also deploy process analytics that contribute to the bottom line as well- they're just not as well known as the front end analytics.

I also like Tal's focus on the practical; one of the problems with historical BI projects is that some companies have tried to 'boil the ocean", and they still bear scars from that, fearing payback on new projects. Reasonable scoping and focus could have helped there.

CSPs have lots of issues to overcome here, not just fear of regulators, Cost, legacy data integration, complexity, historical project performance,  skills, organizational barriers, and even complacency given current tools contribute to the slow adoption of better analytics. But there is no question that the potential to improve things markedly is there.

Thanks for the great debate. This might provide an inspiration for the progress DA. Even many technologies available, to leverage the gap of an telecom service provide's requirement for BI in internet service era, would be much appreciated by the industry!

This is a good debate. Enablement of analytics lies at the ground level where we have different types of data sets maintained in silos & capabiliies to extract data. New methods and technologies were built to support and now we are finding new was to integrate them. I like what Ian Emsley said...Practical Policies in leveraging of Information by Service Providers. I would like to add one more word to it...Practical Methods & Policies in leveraging of Informatio by Service Providers.

Analytics is the hot new buzzword at the TeleManagement Forum (TMForum). Because I am the Communications Industry Marketing Manager for SAS, you would expect me to return from last week’s TMForum Management World conference with tales about the impor