Blog: John Myers: Needles in the Haystack

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Needles in the Haystack

Within network data that most telecom organizations have collected, there lies a wealth of information that could be used by many different departments. Jim Barthold has a good article that The issue is that majority of this is viewed as simply collected network data. But there are needles in the haystack of collected xDRs.

Just as there is information about network issues or usage, there is specific information about customer adoption rates on products and services. Among the information about switch and trunk data is information about how products are performing. It is the ability to use this data that will separate robust organizations from other telecommunication providers.

In fact, this situation shows one of the barriers to the use of business intelligence that most organizations, telecom or otherwise, have. Many organizations have the data, but they have issues understanding exactly what the data is or can tell them. According to an article from Allen Alter, often times, it takes 2-5 years for organizations to truly start to utilize their data.

While I think that is a little longer than most organizations have patience for, it does show that BI isn’t as quick as some would like. Also, it shows that there is a “trick” to the gleaning of information from data. Most organizations will need to time to either develop in-house talent or contract with outside organizations to truly gain value from their data.

Technorati Tags: Telecommunications, Telecom, Telecom Operations, Business Intelligence, Allen Alter, Jim Barthold