Blog: John Myers

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October 31, 2007

Live from Orlando

The TDWI Conference in Orlando this week features a slightly different theme. Rather than strictly technical data quality the topic was overall leadership in the area of data governance. This difference in theme brought out “new blood” in terms of attendees and vendor/sponsors.

Many of these attendees and vendors are focusing their energy on the business, or contextual, aspects of data governance rather than just the technical, or syntax related aspects that have been traditionally a part of data quality. This manifests itself in areas like master data management (MDM) for customer relationship management as a part of integrated marketing efforts; revenue assurance as part of revenue management; or route optimization as part of an operations research segment of cost management.

This focus, on assessing the business value of an organization’s data in addition to its technical consistency, is showing the maturity of data professionals and their place in the organization. This is similar to my "Needles in the Haystack" posting earlier this month.

Technorati Tags: Telecommunications, Telecom, TDWI, Operations, Master Data Management, MDM, Revenue Assurance, Route Optimization, Data Governance

Posted by John Myers at 9:54 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

October 22, 2007

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

Posted by John Myers at 8:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)