Mining data

Even those who vividly remember the Cuban missile crisis may not know who Oleg Penkovsky was.

He played the most pivotal behind-the-scenes role in the confrontation many believe was the closest the U.S. and Soviet Union came to outright war. Today, he is an illustration of the importance and value of information.

Penkovsky was a Soviet general inside the Kremlin working for the Central Intelligence Agency. It was he who supplied President Kennedy with the inside intelligence that Nikita Khrushchev would not risk nuclear war in an attempt to run a U.S. embargo of Cuba.

Kennedy sent the boats knowing the gamble, but with Penkovsky as his ace in the hole. The Soviets turned back. The rest is history.

Telecom competition does not involve this level of global brinksmanship, but the survival of any enterprise--large or small--depends on the ability to extract and interpret information. The ability to do so is the difference between winning and losing customers. And when those customers represent millions in revenues, you can't lose too often.

Hence, we're seeing a new understanding of the role of operations support systems (OSSs) and their partnership with data warehousing.

Even as they began revamping and streamlining their OSSs several years ago, most carriers measured the value of these systems in internal business terms, says David Curry, senior vice president of global business development at Architel Systems Corp., a Toronto-based supplier of large-scale OSS software for telecom. That is, the success of OSS streamlining was gauged by the number of jobs eliminated.

Architel's customers include Bell Atlantic, Ameritech and WorldCom in the U.S., and Energis, Telenor and Telecom New Zealand overseas. Ericsson packages the software with its infrastrucutre.

These days, Curry suggests, carriers are coming around to the idea that OSS success should be measured by how much better they are at meeting customer needs. That is, a well-built OSS should yield information about customer usage habits and buying patterns, as well as be flexible and coordinated enough that one help desk technician can handle customer problems anytime, day or night.

The basic concept behind any modern, large-scale OSS is to knock out as many of the "handoffs"--the number of departments and systems--as possible in the service delivery process.

Often, fingers point to incumbent LECs as the most likely to suffer from stovepipe systems and OSS bloat. But, as Architel's president and CEO, Tony van Marken, is quick to point out, some of the newer competitive LECs already have similar problems creeping into their processes. One relatively new player in the national CLEC arena has 20 handoffs in the service provisioning process.

Yet in addition to streamlining service delivery, OSSs are also for sorting and identifying the way customers, be they large or small, use telecommunications. This data and the speed at which it can be processed and evaluated can be the difference in a carrier's win or loss of a sale.

So the next logical step is the introduction of data warehousing. In other words, now that OSSs have been set up to better gather information needed to run the business, how can that information be used to further build the business?

In a report last month (Telephony, Aug. 11, page 18), Features Editor Joan Engebretson reported that data warehousing is more than a fad. Data warehousing begins with data mining, which means mainly examining aggregate user records and determining trends. Analysis of information is just as critical is the information-gathering itself.

A great example in the article is how one Bell regional holding company discovered that certain customers had high rates of local calling between 3 and 5:30 p.m. Correlating this with household demographic data, the carrier found that most of these homes had teenage children. As a result, the company was able to quickly put together a targeted promotional package for second lines or call waiting. The type of service promoted was based on further data: household income.

A streamlined OSS helps provide services fast and gather critical data. Data warehousing can centralize and correlate that data. Analysts interpret it, turning the data into strategic information. All three are vitally important. All three tasks are connected, and their respective strengths are critical to winning in a competitive market.