Jessica Figueras
BI in telecoms: glimmers of intelligent life spotted on Mars
Jessica Figueras reports from the IIR conference, 'Business Intelligence for Customer-centric Telecoms Operators'. When I was preparing my chairman's introduction to this conference, a colleague who has written on business intelligence for over ten years jokingly suggested that I "roll out the usual generalities about culture change". It was a good point. In business intelligence circles, it is a truth universally known that BI tools and technologies are worth little without cultural change. Yet the BI specialists who attend such conferences must have heard this same message year in, year out, with little hope that said change would ever happen. For BI specialists who work in telecoms, the problem is getting the message across to the people who matter. Telcos are typically big, slow-moving organisations with long-established cultures of top-down management, structured in tightly defined silos with generally poor levels of collaboration between them. In short, not the most promising of environments in which a business intelligence culture of cross-company knowledge sharing might flourish. Yet as a thousand Dilberts bang their heads against the sides of their cubicles, perhaps things are changing after all. Telcos are, after all, truly preoccupied with the need to transform themselves into flexible and responsive customer-centric businesses. Even the title of this conference tells us that business intelligence (or more specifically, customer intelligence) is now being seen as a key enabler to this. It was also interesting to see Telstra's celebrity CEO Sol Trujillo delivering one of his many recent keynotes at the Business Leadership Series, an event run by BI tools vendor SAS. Perhaps the way to push through the cultural change needed is for a Trujillo figure to make BI into one of his "big bets" - on the scale of a major network overhaul. Could a CEO mandate provide the impetus needed to force collaboration and data sharing between different business divisions, to build the business case for investment in cross-enterprise BI tools, and to institute BI as a core part of every decision-making process? Interestingly, the consensus at the conference seemed to be the opposite. As one speaker put it, the trouble with big projects is that they are "doomed to succeed" - with so much at stake, such projects can be killed by politics and big egos. The final goal of BI is good decisions - and you can't buy those. So bottom-up change is what is required: using small-scale BI initiatives to build up pockets of focused knowledge in the business, which can be put to work in solving specific problems, with measurable outcomes. To quote Tom Peters, middle managers should "convince the higher-ups of the need for change by doing it, not by brilliant PowerPoint presentations."Speakers from ntl:Telewest and Icelandic telco Siminn demonstrated that this bottom-up approach can indeed work, even in an organisation as big and slow as a telco. In both cases, the BI initiative in question was aimed at gaining a better understanding of the telco's business customers. ntl:Telewest implemented an enterprise data warehouse to bring together information about customers, products, services, usage and costs, involving stakeholders from across the business (including revenue assurance, finance, sales and marketing). Project leader Simon Bennett described how the intelligence gained helped ntl:Telewest to see that its customers' requirements were changing, and then to act on the intelligence by developing targeted new products and services. This closed-loop decision-making did not happen just because of the new technology, but because of the work of a group of super-user BI advocates from across the business, who successfully secured buy-in from senior managers. Asa Run Bjornsdotti of the Icelandic incumbent Siminn described a similar effect, although in Siminn's case the customer intelligence programme comprised an intensive programme of offline research into business customer needs, resulting in significant changes to Siminn's product and service portfolio, plus the adoption of a new consultative selling approach to business customers. Still, most BI practitioners recognise that telcos have only scratched the surface of what can be done with business intelligence. And it seems that just as telcos get to grips with the sort of customer analytics that industries such as retail have excelled at for a long time, the game changes yet again. Accordingly, two of the most interesting presentations of the day - from Arlinda Sipila of Xtract and Nicola Millard of BT - focused on the new challenge to telcos from the rise of social networking. The challenge here is that the ability of brands to influence consumers has diminished, as communication channels have become saturated. Marketing via mass broadcasting no longer works and must be replaced by viral, peer-to-peer approaches. Telcos must therefore build up an understanding of how social behaviour feeds into important customer behaviours such as propensity to churn or to recommend. The old one- and two-dimensional analyses of individual characteristics, such as demographics and service usage data, are not enough. The potential for telcos is enormous - with their wealth of call data, they are arguably in the best position of all to understand who is connected to whom, and to build up pictures of the key social networks that influence their customers. This is particularly the case for full service telcos, who have a view of their customers across a number of channels. Of course, delivering on that theoretical potential is another matter altogether. It's nice to think that life might get more interesting for those long-suffering telco BI specialists!
