Growing Your Data Warehouse

Perhaps you are preparing to plant the first seeds for your data warehouse, or maybe it is already firmly rooted in your organization. Whatever your situation, there are unlimited ways to use a data warehouse in every department of the company. But as more employees see the tremendous value of your investment, you must arrange for an increasing number of users and plan to network them so everyone sees consistent, accurate information.

If you talk to 10 people in the wireless industry, you get 10 different definitions of a data warehouse. People generally agree that it is a central repository of information from several sources within the company, but that's where the agreement ends as the role of a data warehouse is changing.

"Warehouses used to focus on who the customers were and how they used products or services so you could create targeted marketing campaigns," said Fred Thompson, Informix director of global telecom. "Wireless carriers that have implemented data warehouses are beginning to recognize other uses for them and are extending the information to larger parts of the business."

Comcast Cellular uses its warehouse for marketing reporting and analysis, but it plans to link it to departments that touch the customer in some way, said Melissa Nichols, a company spokesperson.

"We are taking our first steps toward making that happen so that we all deal with similar data," she said. "There will be one version of all of these statistics, so we will all be singing off the same song sheet."

WirelessNorth's data-warehouse application enables employees to use company data and data from the billing system for any purpose, said Sherry Anderson, senior manager of client services. The finance department draws information to administer past-due notices to late-paying customers and uses information from the data warehouse to fight fraud. Other departments also use the tool.

Mark Nielsen, Primal Systems chairman of the board, said all of your systems and departments ultimately have something to do with either the customer or the call records. A data warehouse allows each department to know everything about both.

"Why would you preclude any department from knowing everything about that customer throughout the organization?" he asked. "Everything that touches that customer can teach you how to change your processes."

If you look at each department as an island, you are going to miss opportunities to build relationships with customers.

BRANCHING OUT Thompson noted that most people do not relate operations to data warehousing, but this department touches the customer, too. A few major wireless carriers are using billing information to run queries and reports to show equipment-usage trends, which allows them to plan and forecast equipment usage more accurately. They also can store information about eq uipment failures and the number of dropped calls. The information lets them know when and where they need to add new switches or more bandwidth.

"You take the same data you use for billing, fraud or churn analysis and look at it from a different perspective," he said. "Just like people discover new things about their customers, the operations departments are discovering new things about equipment utilization to make better operational decisions."

Then, he continued, your operations department can use the data to help combat churn. If it indicates that there is a pattern of lost calls in a certain area, and you also notice high churn rates in that area, it could mean customers are leaving because of dropped calls. Operations can replace or upgrade the operational systems to solve the problem.

Nielsen agreed that combining operational data with information from your customer-care system is one step. Next, he said, you can compare the data between sites. If you have one site with many dropped calls and another site with fewer dropped calls but more high-value customers using that site, repairing that second site should be your top priority because the impact on revenue is greater there.

"You need a data mart or data warehouse where you are taking information from multiple systems and looking at it in a different way," he said. "Combining this engineering analysis with the value of customers is not widespread."

BUILT TO LAST As each department realizes the opportunities available to it with customer and company data, there will be more pressure on your data warehouse, said Beverly Chiarelli, Ardent Software data warehouse business unit marketing manager. If your MIS department already designed your data warehouse for 15 people in the marketing department to use at one time, you could have problems two years from now if the company expands to 30 people in the department or if other departments need to access it, too. Unfortunately, many tools don't accommodate ongoing requests for more data. She suggested that you design the warehouse for growth right from the start. Think about all of the applications for a data warehouse and who might need it. Then try to predict how many people will use it simultaneously, both tomorrow and five years from tomorrow.

"You want to model the warehouse so that it reflects how information is used in the organization," she said. "You don't want to mold the organization the other way around, letting your systems dictate how your business is going to run."

If your warehouse already is built, you may have to add separate warehouses for each department. The marketing department may want to access all of your sales information. The operations people want all the same information, plus manufacturing information. Chiarelli said you must create a separate data warehouse for operations that is similar to marketing, but you just add other sources to it.

Nielsen said another solution is separate data marts. All of the information from the company's various on-line transaction-processing (OLTP) systems goes into one central warehouse. Departments within the company develop data marts, which are smaller data warehouses designed for a specific function. A department's data mart extracts only information that pertains to that part of the company. By eliminating excess information, you have less data to sort through. Therefore, there is not as much overhead, it doesn't take as long to analyze it, and it is more efficient.

Thompson said various data marts use all of the same information, but in different ways. The marketing department is interested in individuals and their usage and spending patterns. It also wants to know who and where they call and the duration of those calls for future marketing programs. Operations is concerned about a call of a certain duration that uses certain facilities. The information is the same, but the owner of the operational data mart does not want to waste storage space on peoples' names and addresses when it will never use them.

"Operations looks from equipment, out," Thompson said. "Marketing looks from the customer, in."

Stuart Palace, Saville Systems vice president of research and development, said data marts come in handy if you are an incumbent carrier with multiple incompatible data sources. It costs a lot of money to join data from many sources, normalize it and put it into a usable format.

"Sometimes it is too aggressive to think you can have all of your corporate data on a single view because there are so many sources, so many ways of looking at customers," Palace said.

You can take data from one source and send it to a data mart. The problem comes if you have several systems with unrelated data marts because no one is looking at the same version of the data. When you update information in one place, it ideally should update itself everywhere else to present a total view of the company.

When WirelessNorth updates a piece of information in the billing system, it is updated everywhere, Anderson said. The employees only have to touch the data once. Any department can extract the most recent customer or company data.

Not every company is as satisfied with its data warehouse as WirelessNorth. Palace speculated that these companies' warehouses have become defocused and fragmented.

"You can't do your own thing," he said. "It is too expensive, and you don't get the most out of your system."

TAKING ACTION Nielsen pointed out that a data warehouse is pointless unless you use the results to make a change in your business processes and continue to monitor results.

"It is a cyclical process," he said. "If it is not designed properly, a data warehouse or data mart could end up being nothing more than a glorified report writer. It takes a bunch of information and spits out a report, and that's it."

The proper way to use the warehouse is to collect data, analyze it, report on it, and then take an action based on the feedback. Next, you re-analyze the information to see if those actions made a change in the company, he said. For instance, if you are interested in pro-active churn management, a report writer can help you identify your high-value customers. But the data warehouse can identify both high-value customers and customers who have 10% of their calls dropped. You can send a list of those customers to marketing or customer service so that customer service representatives can call them. Then, you can send a message in those customers' bills noting that you see they are having problems with their phones, and you can apologize for the inconvenience. Ask them to bring in the handsets so you can check them over for problems, and give them $20 credits on their accounts as an apology. After you have finished, you can do another analysis to see if churn rates have lowered.

"Now you have gone into the OLTP and kicked off an action, so it is a circular loop, a closed system," Nielsen said. "The value is tremendous."

Palace agreed that an effective data warehouse is a full circle that runs through your customers and every department that touches them. All of the information that comes from your day-to-day business affects customers, whether it is billing, customer care, trouble tickets, call patterns or usage information. If it all funnels to one warehouse that every department can access, employees can arm themselves with information every time a customer calls.

"The investments you make in decision-support tools must have a return," he said. "To get the biggest bang out of a data warehouse, you should use it to get more customers and keep the ones you have got."

Jeff Jones, NCR communications system division director of marketing, said making a data warehouse part of the overall company operations allows wireless carriers to learn more about a customer each time they interact with him. In turn, you can move quickly toward mass customization as you offer better service and more targeted offers such as the best pricing plan.

"You can't do that without a data warehouse," Jones said. "You need cross-functional interaction to truly understand that customer."

Building a new data warehouse? Beverly Chiarelli, Ardent Software data warehouse business unit marketing manager, suggested several ways wireless carriers can build an open warehouse for the future.

1. Design your warehouses to meet the needs of your business. Warehouse architecture based on a clear understanding of your business' critical success factors ultimately will yield the information you need to thrive.

2. Outsource. There are a number of consulting companies well versed in data warehousing that you can hire on a contract basis. Once the warehouse is built, you can keep using design and management tools without keeping the consultants on board.

3. Invest in easy-to-use tools and components that your in-house IS team can manage once the consultants have packed up and left. In addition, easy-to-use tools with a shorter learning curve help new employees come up to speed in less time.

4. Investigate metadata. Metadata, or "the data about data," is crucial to an efficient warehouse. Among other things, metadata provides information on the origin and transformation history of warehouse data. You will want to explore the issues surrounding metadata when building your company's warehouse.

5. Implement tools that are flexible and scaleable when building or updating your warehouse. The right tools will allow you to extend your data-management system to add new users and integrate data from additional sources with as little complication as possible. You will see the value of this when your company acquires data resulting from a merger, partnership, or acquisition.

6. Design your data warehouse so business users have direct access to the information they need. The less involvement your IT department has in everyday queries, the better. You want to avoid turning your IT department into a helpdesk; they are too valuable a resource to be hunting for business data.

7. Invest in tools and components that support multiple platforms. This will allow you to deploy the same applications on Unix, NT and other platforms throughout your company.

8. Look at the number of people who will be using the warehouse and how that number could expand. Make sure your software will support different databases and different platforms, and take into consideration all of the possible add-ons to the system including management and security features to protect corporate data.

9. Provide employees with the data-mining and query tools they need to leverage corporate information in their decision-making processes.

10. Build on what you have. Often you can build on top of existing systems, incorporating legacy storage systems and components in a new warehouse.

The advance of the Internet allows companies to access information from their data warehouses. On-line charting software takes that real-time information a step further by enabling you to view it in a more readable format, said Dan Cronin, Chartworks vice president of marketing.

"An executive would rather look at a chart to see a trend in a couple of seconds than pore through reports," he said. "Users can quickly decipher rows of numbers and tables to make more efficient decisions."

The unique capability offered by on-line charting software is that as the data warehouses change, the charts automatically are updated, with no extra work required of the administrative staff, said Mitch Selbiger, Chartworks director of marketing. In contrast to traditional methods of charting software, where data is frozen and virtually obsolete the minute you import it, on-line charting software enables a company to mount corporate information from multiple data sources on its web site in chart format. Cronin said one major wireless company uses the principal of dynamic chart generation through the intranet combined with a data warehouse to predict and forecast capacity planning and incremental installation requirements.

"On-line charting software offers you live data immediately, which is really the purpose for building a warehouse," Cronin said. "It gives you up-to-the-second chart information, without programming or restructuring the data in any way, shape or form."