Telco Business Intelligence & Revenue Assurance

Index Business Intelligence and Telco Business Intelligence Need for Business Intelligence Inside a Telco Business Intelligence system Italtel solution for Telco Business Intelligence Conclusion Acronyms References 2 2 4 8 10 10 10

Business Intelligence and Telco Business Intelligence

Business Intelligence (BI) spans an application field far larger than the Telco and ICT business covered in this whitepaper. Business Intelligence includes expertise, tools and solutions enabling throughout the whole company effective usage of information collected from a number of sources. BI refers both to technical solutions, as well as to organization process and knowledge management, supporting business vital decision process: this set BI in the category of Business Support Systems (BSS). Another well known BSS is Customer Relationship Management (CRM), to which BI is often connected as a back-end receiving input data and providing customized relevant information, to support and improve Business, in customer front end. Business Intelligence is largely used in every high competitive, larger customer base business sector. Among these sector is for sure telecommunications business, especially after market liberalization, both for fixed and mobile operators. An effective and efficient BI solution is highly dependant on the knowledge of the specific sector for which it has been developed. Italtel has gained a huge expertise in BI solution for Telco. Such expertise has been gained in the design, development and deployment of the largest Business Intelligence system for an Italian fixed operator. Such on field expertise enable Italtel to provide first class support to other service provider, both traditional and innovative. In this whitepaper we describe what Business Support System problems can be solved with a BI solution with beneficial impact on Return Of Investment (ROI).

Need for Business Intelligence

If one look inside a Telco operator or an ICT Service Provider, it is easy to understand how the business critical decisions should be based onto information coming from a heterogeneous set of sources. Moreover decision critical information for a department, is not produced nor owned by the department. Often many departments have not decision effective access to the decision critical information.

Data

Data

Data Data

Data Sources
Call Detail (Switch) Billing Data (Billing Center) Customer Care (Call Center) Subscriber Data (Operational CRM) Network Performan. (OSS)

Who transform internal data into useful informations

Company s ICT Systems contain very large volume of data The value that Companies can achieve from their data is not easy to extract and is not intuitive to understand

Data Users
Marketing Sales Service Operation & Maintenance Network Planning

Figure 1 Why Telco Business Intelligence is needed When Business Intelligence is needed? Simple answer is every time you have complex decision process to be carried out on time. More the decision time is often compressing. This is the case of telecommunication sector, where we witness convergence to Next Generation Networks (NGN). Today one have to provide in new services in time frame that is dramatically shortest than in the past. E.g. to roll out an IN services in past century the time frame was many months or years also due to the lack of competition in the Telco market. Today services providing similar features to end user have to be rolled out in a few months or in weeks, to allow effective marketing action to protect and widen the customer base. 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 Centers, both traditional and IP Contact Center. Call and Contact Center in turn take advantage from reporting provided by Telco Business Intelligence (TBI) system to improve their internal process. Table A tries to sketch a synthesis of TBI users and advantage they can get.

Sector Marketing

Application Analytic
Churn analysis, Customer profiling Sales performance, Channel Performance Customer satisfaction, Call Center utilization and optimization Revenue Assurance, QoS Analysis Trend analysis for Maintenance activity, Traffic data certification Traffic distribution (origins, destinations) New services delivery impact on network infrastructure

Front Office

Sales Service Operation & Maintenance Network Planning

Back Office

Table A: Main users of Business Intelligence system

Inside a Telco Business Intelligence system

In previous section we defined the users and the goals of an ICT/Telco Business Intelligence system. Let now see how such a 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, its 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 Centers, 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.

Figure 2 Input data and users of Telco Business Intelligence.

According to the above listed requirements it is now simple to figure out the architecture of a Business Intelligence system as show Figure 3. Any Business Intelligence system work in a four phase process: Acquisition Aggregation Prediction Collaboration Each of the above phase maps on components of BI system listed below: 1. Extraction Transformation Loading (ETL)1 module 2. Data Warehouse 3. Data Mart 4. Data Mining 5. Intranet Portal Out of these 5 components, components 1 to 4 are mandatory for any BI system, while the last is needed whenever collaboration among end user of a BI system has to be boosted both intra department as well as cross different department. ETL and Data Ware-House (DWH) are vital element for data acquisition and aggregation, while Data Mining tools and data aggregation in Data Mart implement prediction process supporting decision of Business Intelligence end users.

For Telco Business Intelligence is mandatory to have specific ETL. Such ETL has to be able to process a very large base of data from different Telco equipment deployed in the networks monitored.

Figure 3 Overall Technological Architecture of a Service Provider Business Intelligence system All the components and phases encompassed by a Business Intelligence system are not connected as an open chain but rather in a cyclic process as shown in Figure 4. A sound Business Intelligence system has to allow adjustment of both the collection and elaboration process of data supporting the business. This is to cater for two fundamental needs: improve Business Intelligence system efficiency and effectiveness adapt to the change of the business typical of high competition markets as Telco and ICT

BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE LIFECYCLE

What happened ?
Execution of choosen actions through Transactional Systems

EVALUATE
(Reports) (Reports)

Evaluation of business events and opportunities

Execute the change

ACT ACT
(OLTP) (OLTP)

ANALYZE ANALYZE
(Query) (Query)

Why did it happen ?

Knowledge discovery in databases : modelization and comparison of various solutions

MODEL
(Data Mining) (Data Mining)

Discovery: Prediction:

What similarities in analyzed data ? What will happen if we make this change ?

Further investigation through ad hoc query

Figure 4 Self adjustment process of a Business Intelligence system

Italtel solution for Telco Business Intelligence

Relying on our experience in telecom as solution provider, Italtel has developed an offer for Business Intelligence solutions based on two assets: In depth knowledge of networks and systems related More than ten years on field experience on OSS/BSS Huge Know How in Telco Business Intelligence roll out, gathered collaborating as partner with the main Italian Telco operator. Cooperative approach to customer to provide both consultancy as well as highly scalable solution to fit customer needs. Italtel is one of the main providers of telecommunication solutions, encompassing both our own products and third party products. Italtel is the developer of the Ulisse [1] TBI system and is actively working in the development of this system. It is worth quoting juts the main phases of this huge project in order to show the capability of Italtel in this field. First contribution of Italtel in the development of Ulisse system relied on the in depth knowledge we have on networks. In the first phase of the project Italtel has been involved in the definition of requirements for the TBI system. In this phase in addition to network knowledge the key contribution of Italtel has taken to the project has been the understanding of constraint and border condition imposed by the diverse elements that was going to feed the TBI Ulisse system.

Once set system requirements, Italtel has identified the technologies suitable to implement each part of the system. In addition Italtel developed from the scratch a Telco specific ETL, needed for Ulisse project. This development was undertaken and successfully carried out since analysis done in the design phase with the customer made clear that none of the commercial ETL available at time of project was suitable. Hence the required ad hoc ETL module was engineered and developed and delivered. At the same time Italtel designed and implemented a Data Warehouse suitable to the large amount of data processed by the system. Italtel covered both data warehouse software as well hardware issues. On top of this infrastructure suitable data views have been created, using Data Mart. Data Marts and suitable applications have been designed and developed for each of the Telecom department that use the data produced in their process. The increasing number of application and the widening base of user lead the customer to ask Italtel for an intranet portal to access Ulisse system. This way Ulisse has become a vital work tool for many departments inside the customer relying for their daily operation on services from Ulisse Telco Business Intelligence system. In Figure 5 are shown some of the application supported by Ulisse and their users. The set is of course un-complete since both the set of applications and the portal are continuously been extended

Marketing & Sales

Traffic Indicator

Operation & Maintenance

Revenue Assurance

Network Planning
Individual Exchange Analysis

Customer Service
Call Center Analysis

BI Technological Infrastructure

Internet Traffic Analysis

Trend Analysis

Peak Analysis

Data WareHousing
DWH ETL ETL Business Customer Traffic Analysis Service based Analysis (ADSL, IN,WiFi)

Intell. Network Service Analysis

Figure 5: Example of some of the applications available in the Telco Business Intelligence solution.

Conclusion
In this short white paper we gave some hints on Telco Business Intelligence systems and on the reason for which they are vital for. The high level description of the architecture and of functionalities here provided cannot be but an introduction to the subject. For more information on this subject see the Reference section and in particular to the web links listed there and to the public internet site www.italtel.com for up to date information.

Acronyms
ADSL BI BSS CC CDR CRM DWH ETL ICT IN IPCC NGN NP O&M OSS QoS RA RI ROI SP TBI Asymmetrical Digital Subscriber Line Business Intelligence Business Support System Call Center Call Detail Record Customer Relationship Management Data Ware House Extraction Transformation Loading Information and Communications Technology Intelligent Network IP Contact Center Next Generation Network Network Planning Operation & Maintenance Operation Support System Quality of Service Revenue Assurance Rete Intelligente (Italian Language) Return Of Investment Service Provider Telco Business Intelligence

References
[1] Piero Todorovich La Business intelligence quando i dati sono molti. Lesperienza Italtel nella realizzazione del pi grande sistema di data warehouse in Italia, Computerworld 20th December 2004. [2] Un nuovo tipo di intelligenza Network World Italia May 17th 2004. [3] Maurizio Tondi Il punto sulla Business Intelligence, Corriere delle Opere May 2004 [4] Maurizio Tondi Dalla Business Intelligence alla corporate performance, Beltel April 2004