MINI PROJECT REPORT

ON

BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE SOLUTION FOR TELECOM

SUBMITTED TO

MIT PUNE’s
MIT SCHOOL OF TELECOM MANAGEMENT
BY

CHAWANDKE ROHIT SURYAKANT

PRN: 091030

Batch: 2009-2011

SUBJECT: TELECOM BUSINESS MANAGEMENT (TBM)

SPECIALIZATION: SYSTEMS
Introduction
The Telecom Industry – “An ever changing and competing market
place”. With all the business and data management challenges, many of the
industry executives still feel that their organization is not ready for a BI solution. A
typical BI solution with a strong process orientation is presented to understand its
importance and need to the organization. The inherent advantages of the solution
are highlighted.

Market Dynamics- Analysis

The urge to be a leader, to be best in service and to possess
maximum customer base for each enterprise within this industry has resulted in a
dynamic market place. The Indian market is seen as a high potential market with
densely populated geographies. A wide variety of customers and customer
segments make a market an interesting place. The dynamics are influenced by
three players – Customer, Organization and Competitor.

Customer
Customers now have more choices, better offers and more flexibility
for access to information. Service providers are mere facilitators. The industry
needs to align to the needs of the customer. With the increasing needs and
expectations, customers tend to accelerate the competition in the marketplace.
With better choices and varied options, customers are more inclined
to look for better services. Acquisition comes with no barrier of binding the
customer to the service provider. It has now become important to focus on
customer retention than customer acquisition. The cost of customer acquisition as
compared to customer retention is now reducing.

Organization
Infrastructure: Investments in infrastructure are at its peak. There has been a
continuous drive to reach the lowest level in the geography with high data
availability. Latest technology for efficient data transfer and network availability
facilitate in propagating the service to the lowest customer segment.
Technology Adoption: “Now you can access the Internet on your mobile”,
“Connectivity- anywhere, anytime” – Exciting for techno savvy people. This kind of
advertisement indicates advancements in technology. Technology has been fast
advancing from the days when mobile phones were being used only as voice
communication devices to today, when they are used as cameras and internet
kiosks and for data exchange by Bluetooth. Technology is progressing and
organizations need to adapt to the change quickly.
Innovative Services: Introduction of ‟Fixed Wireless Phones‟ with advanced value
added services have enabled customers to enjoy the benefits of wireless technology
at cheaper rates. This innovation has now eliminated wire connectivity for voice and
data communications. It could be viewed as an innovation in service offering. Such
kind of innovative offers often create a wave of excitement among customers, thus
impacting the market place.
Mergers and Acquisitions: With competition at its peak and a risk of saturation
of the customer base, mergers and acquisitions are seen as a viable option. It helps
in increasing the customer base of the organization and in taking a step towards
establishing their monopoly in the region. For example, recently the US market has
seen two big mergers of Cingular-ATT and Verizon-MCI. Mergers and acquisitions
usually bring in a mixed impact on customers, but create a great ripple in industry
dynamics. It is a greater threat to the players, of either being taken over or losing
customers. This has not been evident in the Indian market, but the day is not too
far for mergers and acquisitions to start off.

Competitor
Competition is evident all over. Advertisements, pamphlets, marketing
calls and other media provide information about the increasing competition in the
market. A race to offer low, affordable prices and customized services has created
turmoil in the market place. Relaxation of regulations by the regulatory bodies has
helped penetrating the market. In the recent past, introduction of cheaper prices
attracted a huge customer base to an organization, leading to a serious competitive
environment in the Indian telecom market.
 With all these factors adding to the dynamics of the market,
organizations need to be agile in managing their operations and offerings, and in
meeting customer expectations. Dynamics tend to impact the customer and the
organization. A comparison shows that though there are a few gains and losses to
the players in the game, they tend to balance.

Impact of Dynamics

Business Focus
The game requires intelligence, proactive thinking and quick
adaptability and strategies to welcome the change. Every organization strives to be
a market leader. Some of the general focal points of the game are explained in the
sections below.
• Customer Centricity: The business is driven by the ‟Customer„– a fact that
necessitates knowing the customer better. Business has to be customer
centric. Customer centricity means to understand and be informed about:
1. Customers‟ requirements and expectations.
2. Customers‟ changing behaviour, demographics and psychology
3. Customers‟ behaviour pattern and activities, and the external factors
which impact the customer
• Business has to focus more on customer retention and customer care. A
greater challenge lies in influencing the customer to be with the organization.
 • Product Pricing: A true distinguisher between a competitor and a leader is
to be a ‟Leader in setting competition„. Businesses always strive to set a
competitive price in the market place well before the competitor thinks of it.
Being proactive in customizing the offerings to offer value to the customer
while maximizing its profit is the prime focus.
• Manage costs: Every organization has a drive internally to reduce the cost.
It could be the cost of customer acquisition, retention or the launch of a new
product/ service. A single dime saved is a dime earned. Cost reduction by
means of increasing productivity of employees, increasing efficiency of
existing network or expense reduction alternatives have taken priority.
● Manage Information Flow: „Be informed‟. The information flow within the
organization has to be healthy in terms of accuracy, availability and usability.
Right information available at the right time helps in taking quick strategic
decisions. A successful player is always equipped with the right information at
the right time.
● Competitor know-how: Understand, know and predict the competitor
behaviour. Analyze the impact and strategize business decisions. Know when
is the right time to launch a new product, acquire new customers, acquire the
competitor and predict the risk of being acquired. Organizations always keep a
watch on the competitors. After all it is a tactic of the game.
To win a game, a player has to be well informed and should make
quick, wise decisions. Decisions are effective and accurate if the player understands
the other players and their next moves well. This is facilitated by data and
intelligence.
Users of Business Intelligent System:
Typical users of a Business Intelligence system inside an ICT Service Provider are
all the departments that have to take business decision. Main users taking advantage of Business
Intelligence are:
• Marketing
• Sales
• Operation
• Network Planning
• Customer Care Service
 In their daily work the department in charge of sales and marketing
need to access to both synthesis and detailed data on customer expenditure, on
actual usage of base and value added services, on CRM efficiency and effectiveness
e.g. of Call Centres, both traditional and IP Contact Centre. Call and Contact Centre
in turn take advantage from reporting provided by Telco Business Intelligence (TBI)
system to improve their internal process. The following figure tries to sketch a
synthesis of TBI users and advantage they can get.

Main Users of Business Intelligent System

Inside a Telco Business Intelligence System

The Telco system works in an effective way. This can be summarized
in the sentence “Business Intelligence is a process to turn information into actions
(decisions)” To get such goal a good Business Intelligence solution must satisfy
some fundamental requirements:
• Precision
• Speed
• Data validation both for input and output information
First requirement is easy to understand if we take into account that BI
system is somehow the equivalent of the “company neural system”. On second and
third requirements, it‟s worth spending a few words. The process and function
played by a Business Intelligence system have to be carried out anyhow into a
company since they are vital to support business. A Business Intelligence system
actually boosts the speed of taking and making effective decision which give an
advantage on competitors.
A Business Intelligence system is as good as it can provide requested
output based on valid input data. This lead to consider the requirement of
information validation on input data as well as during processing and on synthesis
output data delivered to the BI end users. The large amount of data collected by
network elements, by Operation Support and IT System, as well as the one from
human operators, like in Call Centres, can easily result in data inconsistency and
mismatch. If not properly dealt, these inconsistencies can make the BI system un-
effective. This is well described by the aphorism: “Garbage in – garbage out”. Hence
Business Intelligence must to clean out as far as possible data inconsistency and
validate both input and output data.

Input Data and Users of Telco Business Intelligence

Business Challenge - Data Management

New players are seen emerging in the market. A high potential market
and very less time to attract customers are forcing the players to accelerate their
offerings. Data Management has taken a back seat and is not a priority. This has
led to a lot of chaos and dissatisfaction among the customers. Customers often
complain about inaccurate billing, unavailability of network and frequent disruption
of their service. Analysis of the problem results in ‟poor data in the operational
systems„. Data management has become difficult due to its volume, rapidly
changing business and quick implementation of the IT systems to support business
in the market place.
Data management life cycle is a closed loop which starts from data
acquisition and reaches the data exploitation state before starting off with data
acquisition. The cyclic nature is due to business maturity and growth.

Data Management Life Cycle

Data Acquisition:
Data acquisition is focused on the operational needs. There is a huge
gap in the data acquisition requirement. Analytics and intelligence to support the
business is heavily dependent on the data being captured within the system.
The ‟Customer centric' business focus has created a demand of the
customer data within organizations. Organizations are not geared to have effective
analysis on customer demographics and preferences. They need to bridge the gap
between operational data and analytic data.
Data Quality:
There is a constant struggle and steps are being taken in the IT
section of this industry to overcome this challenge. Data quality challenge is
everywhere – data collected from customer facing applications to customer serving
applications. This has resulted in customer dissatisfaction thus impacting the image
of the player in the market place. A simple example being subscribers‟
activation/inactivation with incorrect dates (variation in year) resulting in incorrect
billing. This results in loss of revenue to the organization and/or in the loss of
customer confidence. Data quality to ensure accurate, timely, meaningful and
correct data poses a great challenge.
Data Integration:
Data is present in various operational systems but they do not
synchronize in an understandable format. Operational systems are loosely tied up
with each other with less synchronization of data. Different representations of a
business entity/element reflected in the reports create chaos in data assimilation.
Today a lot of time and effort is spent on data assimilation activities within an
organization.
Data Exploitation:
The data utility index – utilization of data in the organizations is low.
Each data element has to be completely utilized by analyzing its relevance and
importance. This ensures minimal redundancy and presents uniformity of data
elements. It brings in new data requirements triggering off the cycle of data
management.
An external factor which controls and contributes the data
management loop is ‟Change in Business processes„. This is not very frequent but
inevitable. Increasing competition, mergers and acquisitions and new offerings
demand change in the business processes.
In an ideal world, it is impossible to achieve data completeness and
correctness in an organization due to its cyclic nature. Data Management is not a
problem but a continuous challenge which needs to be managed. It‟s a continuous
improvement process which leads to ancient data management.
The Solution
Every problem has a solution and every challenge can be alleviated.
To address data management issues with the change in the business strategies and
processes is a bigger challenge for an organization. An intelligent support layer for
the operational system can lend a support to business by providing quality data and
business analytics.

Solution

Market is an external factor that impacts the business strategies from

time to time. It is a game wherein the organization and the competitors compete to
maximize their market share Business strategies are aligned to meet customer
expectations and challenge competitors in the market place. These strategies
impact the market place with its innovative, new and competitive offerings.
Business strategies define the business processes within an organization.
Business Processes are existing processes that support the
organization in the market place. The existing processes change with the expansion
of business either through market expansion, enhancements in service offerings or
mergers and acquisitions. New processes often get defined to support new products
or services. The solution for the changing business strategies and processes
necessitates two supporting layers – a Service layer and a Data Process layer– that
are described below:
 ● Service: This layer supports the business strategies with data, metadata,
information and analytic services. This layer is driven by the business
processes. Changes and introduction of new business process enhances it to
adapt to the business needs.
● Data Process layer:
• Interacts with the operational systems for continuous monitoring and
mentoring.
• Derives intelligence with inbuilt business and data processing rules
• Helps identify the obscure market behaviour with predefined algorithms
• Ensure feedback to the service layer for continuous improvement
The internal and external dynamics creates turbulence in the
organization‟s data management process. The solution has to be intelligent and
flexible to support the business needs and the operational data management
challenges. The solution should be a well defined methodology directed by vision
supporting business with right information and intelligence and provide feedback for
efficient data management. A process which collates, validates, integrates and
defines rules for quality data.

Business Intelligence Solution

Business Intelligence (BI) solution is not a mere data warehousing
solution that encapsulates data to provide analytics, derived intelligence and easy
access to information. It is a process that extracts, collates, validates, reconciles
and integrates the data to provide intelligence to the business as well as to the
operations. It is the intelligence of the process that can help in providing guidance
to mitigate the challenges within an organization. BI solution advantage is two fold
one to provide intelligence about the operational systems and facilitate data
management, and the other to support the business with its analytics and
reporting.
BI solution is a service oriented process. The two fold benefit has data
service and analysis and intelligence service in a chronological order. The logical
framework, nucleus of the solution encapsulates data requirements and a well
defined process. Data requirements facilitate capture of all data elements required
by the business for its operations and analysis. Data process helps in churning out
the intelligence for the business and operations.

BI Solution
Data Service facilitates high quality prepared data for the reporting
and MIS of the organization. This layer is focused on attaining operational
excellence within the organization. There is a continuous feedback mechanism
involved in the process to ensure appropriate correction at the operational systems.
BI solution builds a highly sophisticated ETL (Extract, Transform, and Load) process
encapsulating business rules. Intelligence as data quality and integration rules can
be churned out of the process. This information if tapped properly provides rich
source of data correction methods.
The process can churn out the differences between the systems (out
of sync), non- conformance to standards, integration issues. ETL process functions
of cleansing, integrating and standardization leading to high quality data, the rules
can be re-used to apply back to the operational systems. Data Acquisition
requirements can also be driven by the BI solution. This necessitates the solution to
be designed and aligned with the vision. BI-DW can act as a single source for data
acquisition recommendations. Details are discussed in the section „Business
Intelligence – Approach. The analysis and intelligence layer supports the business
with its needs of reporting and analysis. Intelligence is usually referred to
derivations of business metrics. OLAP analysis and reporting is a known function of
BI solution. A step ahead of it, which BI solution intends to achieve, is ‟High End
Analytics‟.
High End Analytics: Data mining or identification of hidden trends is required to
completely understand the business and its events/facts. This technique is very
rarely adopted and seen as the next step after Data Warehousing (DW). BI solution
acts as foundation to support and facilitate high end analytics. Algorithms can be
devised to derive intelligence and provide online support to:
● Call centres about the customers for better customer facilitation
● Executives about the current trends and forecasted data
● Decision options and the impact of each option
● Identification of fraud and corrective measures based on historical trends
● Create awareness to the business about the upcoming events based on
historical trends.

Data Service - Process Flow

Business decisions need historical data, trends and intelligent
analytics. Operational systems need mentoring for data management. Two facets of
the requirements necessitates in setting a process within the organization. Figure 4
below depicts the BI process flow and its components which helps in providing
efficient data service.
 BI Process Flow
The challenges like data quality and data integration have to be
rectified at the source level. “Get to the root and fix it”. BI process comprising of
data capture, data quality check and integration can provide continuous feedback to
the source systems.
● Data quality check performed in ETL provides data quality reports that
indicate where the source systems are deviating from the set standards. This
helps in making immediate corrective actions at the source.
● Data Integration process defines the standards across the organization. The
feedback at this stage should be tapped to achieve standardization of data
elements across the business.
● Data quality and integration reports on reconciliation provide data correction
methodologies. Reconciliation process collates all the reports and validates
against the business rules to provide data correction recommendations.
● BI program, built on proper methodology, feeds back the data acquisition
requirements to the source systems. Additional attributes and metrics required
to be captured are passed back to the source systems to ensure data
completeness in the organization.
Business Intelligence Solution – Addressing Challenges
The challenge for the business is to keep pace with the market and
address the internal data management issues. A quick validation of the BI solution
components against the critical industry challenges today is depicted in Table 2
below.

Industry challenges and BI solution

Business Intelligence – Approach

BI- Solution Approach

 A BI solution is a process constituting of methodologies,
infrastructure, tools and technology.
● Methodology – A framework which is aligned to organization vision. A
complete roadmap to the journey of intelligent support
● Infrastructure – Define and procure infrastructure to support the solution
● Tools and Technology – Tools and accelerators that can be plugged in, to
catalyze the process
Methodology
BI solution needs to be driven by the executives and analysts of the
organization. This ensures that the solution has an enterprise wide approach
backed up with vision of the organization. A methodology should define the
following in a chronological order:
● Key performance indicators for the organization. The key performance
indicators define the roadmap for the organization. This ensures completeness
of the analytic and reporting requirements.
● Definition of the metric: All the key performance indicators defined at the
lowest level. This determines data elements that the organization would need
to align to their vision.
● Operational challenges: Define the operational challenges faced by the
organization, data management and data dissemination challenges.
● Roadmap for implementation: Would a step by step implementation help the
organization or can it go for a full fledged DW in a single step? This is based
on each organization and can be decided at an interaction level with the
executives of the organization. It is suggested to have a “Build step by step”
approach backed with a complete EDW vision.
● Guidelines for implementation: Set up a clear guideline. Step 1 to Step n of
the complete life cycle. Support it with templates and use cases.
At this stage the solution should not be influenced by data availability,
data quality and integrity issues. This would lead to convergence of the solution.
Methodology definition should be based on business requirements, data
management challenges and vision of the business. Correct and complete
identification of the key performance indicators facilitates effective data acquisition
Tools and Technology
Tools facilitate in accelerating the process. Organizations need to have
well defined models and tools which enable them to drive towards business
excellence.
● Operational Data store: A data store that houses operational data. It is the
layer that ensures capture of base business elements, data quality and data
integration. This tool would help in citing the data quality issues and
application of business rules to integrate the data.
● Analytics: A data store which captures all the required metrics identified as
key performance indicators for the business. This tool helps in providing end
to end view of the customer and the business at an aggregated level. Provides
OLAP capabilities for power users and dashboards for the executives.
● Data mining and high end analytics: Derived intelligence from the behaviour
of business elements over a period of time. This tool helps in understanding
and forecasting the trends of the business and customer over a period of
time.
● Canned reports: Static piece of information for information consumers. This
tool facilitates in providing health check measures and details of the daily
transactions. Could consist of transactional, historical data or certain derived
metrics of the business
The BI technology stack chosen for the program has to be
meticulously evaluated. The tools and technology should support complete end to
end data processing to:
● Ensure timely availability of data
● Manage huge data volumes efficiently
● Support efficient load and retrieval process
● Check and integrate proficient and efficient data quality
● Intelligent processes – Supporting rich metadata and alerting capability
● Ease data access
● Secured access to information
Infrastructure
The solution needs to be backed up with infrastructure. It is
imperative that the investment is based on evaluation of tools and technology in the
market. Requirement of infrastructure is the final step before going into the design
and development phase. Delay in infrastructure availability impacts the ROI (Return
on Investment) of the solution. Thus, it has to be judiciously planned and executed.
The infrastructure components required for the BI solution are:
● Hardware: The nature of data storage, data processing and volume of the
data defines the requirement of the hardware.
● Software: Data processing, data security and retrieval drive the software
requirement
● Network availability and connectivity: The network availability and connectivity
have to be ensured. The data volumes and processing time determines the
bandwidth requirement.
There is a great risk of failure of the solution if the infrastructure
support is not appropriate. Upgrade of infrastructure is feasible but as it relates to
capital investment, there is always a delay in procurement. This results in
degradation of user community dependability and data integrity issues around the
organization. It is suggested to have infrastructure planned with projections and
procured in a timely manner without inhibiting the advantages of the solution.

Proposition
The urge to excel in the market place has been driving organizations.
Data management and exploitation have not been on the priority list. This has
resulted in dissatisfaction of customers and has also led to organizations slowly
tending to reduce their market share. BI solution has been interpreted as an
expensive and time consuming effort. The inherent advantages of the intelligent
processes are rarely analyzed and weighed. Especially in the telecom industry, data
management challenges have engulfed the environment. It needs a process to be
in place to suggest continuous improvement. BI solution has always been viewed as
an analytic/ reporting solution and hence is given less or least priority. A BI solution
can eliminate many intermediate and quick solutions being designed and developed
in the industry. The processes formulated in the BI solution could be reused to
ensure proper utilization of time and investment. A guided approach to the solution
could facilitate achieving business and operational excellence for the organization.

Conclusion:
BI solutions are based on Business Intelligence Decision Support
(BIDSTM), a complete framework definition and the process flow for a BI
implementation. The methodology offering encapsulates not only the framework
and the guidelines but also the templates which guide the implementation process
step by step.
For the telecom vertical, „tBIDS- Telecom BIDS‟ - a packaged solution
encapsulating a logical model backed up with analytical templates for reporting and
analysis has been developed. A continuously maturing model helps in plugging in
the package and reducing a substantial effort of requirements and design. The
package details out all the critical attributes data elements required by the industry
vertical supported with rich metadata.
A service model, Business Intelligence Competency Centre (BICC),
provides end to end service solution to its customer. The competency centre
facilitates the customer in providing services like methodology definition,
infrastructure requirements, solution research, and vendor liaison, technology
centre of excellence, competency and knowledge management. The centre acts as
a single point of contact in the organization for business, IT and vendors (service
and infrastructure) facilitating in guided approach to the business intelligence
program.