MBG Article

Analytics - Making Sense Out of Telecom Data

In the world of telecom, data is everywhere. Spreadsheets, billing statements from vendors, and invoices to customers are just a few sources. With data formats changing all the time, it can be difficult to keep lining up information from month-to-month, let alone the ability to compare information across different sources. And, as time moves forward, there will be increasing pressure to quickly analyze information from these data sources.

To aggregate information across multiple vendors and present it in a consistent manner is a key objective for any telecom analysis initiative.

Standards for Comparison

The first step to effectively analyze information is to match like information and look at common attributes of that information. An interesting comparison can be found in the world of running for sport and fitness. Look to your local outdoor running activities schedule from active.com or the local newspaper. When you look at the long list of local running events, you will see everything from 1 mile family fun runs; to 10k distance races; to marathons. While it is relatively easy to know the difference between one mile, 6.2 miles (10k), and 26.2 miles (marathon) from a conceptual perspective, it can be more difficult to understand how a group of people have comparatively performed over those distances and how they may have improved over time.

With telecom expense management, it is not as easy as converting all your information to miles, but the challenge is much the same. You need to have a single source of information and that information needs to be consistently measured and normalized so that you can analyze the information across all sources.

Consistent Presentation

After you have all of your information in one place and in one consistent measure or set of measures, you need a way to present that information so that the value of the information can be easily determined. Again, following the example above, the world of competitive, and not so competitive, runners have established the metric of “average minutes per mile” as the standard to judge each other in a particular race and even across different races. At the end of a race, officials will post a report with the results for the race broken down by different criteria: age, gender, classification, etc. For those interested, this is a quick and easy way to judge their efforts. However, this report is generally only looking at one or two metrics for one running event.

Now, imagine that you wanted to judge the performance of the entire race against last year’s race performance or you wanted to look at a group of runners’ performance in several different distances across the last three months. This becomes more difficult due to the fact that the different metrics and measures can become confusing. For telecom managers, the key is to be able to take all that data and present it in way that tells the story not only for one metric, but for many; and tells the story not just for today, but over time.

Analytical Dashboards

A great solution to the twin issues of presentation and trend analysis is the analytical dashboard and its associated key performance indicators (KPIs). These dashboards come in many shapes and sizes, but almost universally they have the mission to present information for many different sources in a way that enables telecom managers to make decisions and see patterns using graphical presentations in a way that looking at spreadsheets, billing statements and invoices just does not allow. Or to be more accurate, that spreadsheets, billing statements and invoices do not allow quickly and easily.

KPIs can be configured to show current performance against budgeted and/or planned performance via the nearly universal “Red, Yellow, Green” color indicators. KPIs can also be presented to show how current performance compares to other sources of information or how that performance compares to past performance in terms of trend analysis.

Can a spreadsheet do that? It depends. At the very least, to accomplish this analysis in a spreadsheet, with telecom data, requires a fair amount of work and comprehesive understanding of the data. On the other hand, analytical dashboards can present information in an accessible format that allows organizations to easily understand how resources are being utilized and make decisions quickly on the proper allocation of those resources.

To conduct effective analysis of telecom data, users need to agree upon standards for comparison and have a consistent view and way to share that information. Analytical dashboards can help in this regard, but determining the correct KPIs to measure performance will be a key success factor. The effort is worthwhile, with companies that have invested in these kinds analysis reaping benefits that drive strong returns on investment in new technologies.