TORONTO—Despite all the industry hype surrounding Big Data, service providers can easily fail with analytics initiatives if they focus too much on just the data itself.
That was one of a number of key takeaway points from data analytics experts at the Canadian Telecom Summit here Monday. Speaking on a packed morning panel, the six industry experts advised telecom and cable providers to put their business values and customer needs first, not the tracking, collection and analysis of all the data flowing through their networks. Otherwise, the experts warned, the data analytics projects will likely either fall short of expectations or simply flop.
"This is not about technology," said Sanjay Kumar, general manager of global telecommunications industry for Hortonworks, which promotes a data analytics platform called Apache Hadoop for enterprises and other businesses. "It's about what's driving the technology, it's about where you see the business benefits of it."
Case in point: Telus. The large Canadian telecom, wireless and broadband provider has made a name for itself by leveraging advanced customer data analytics to help cut its churn rate and improve the customer experience. At least partly as a result, Telus now boasts the lowest subscriber churn among major service providers in North America.
"We've kept the focus on customer value," said Lloyd Switzer, senior vice president of network transformation for Telus. "You have to start with focusing on customers."
Switzer and other panelists also advised service providers to concentrate on optimizing their networks and building up their capabilities to manage and govern the growing volume of data traffic flowing through their networks. In Telus' case, for instance, the provider is now handling data from 20 billion voice sessions and 110 billon wireless sessions a year. With its annual data traffic load having doubled from 6 petabytes to 12 petabytes in just the past two years, the company is looking to expand its capacity to handle up to 30 petabytes.
"It's not a data pool or a data lake, it's a data ocean.” Lloyd Switzer, Telus
"It's not a data pool or a data lake, it's a data ocean," Swifter quipped. "There's an incredible amount of data and it's coming in from everywhere,"
With such huge amount s of data streaming into their networks, the panel speakers called on network operators to make other changes as well, For example, Kumar urged service providers to switch from their current service delivery models to a more "data-centric" approach. Such an approach, he argued, would bring the apps to the data rather than vice versa, minimizing the movement of the data around the network and making it easier to make use of the information in real-time.
Rajesh Nambiar, who heads the telecoms unit of TIBCO Software Canada, suggested that service providers learn a few lessons from banks, such major retailers as Macys and airlines, which have all used their data analytics expertise to build strong customer loyalty programs. "Banks and retailers are ahead of the telcos in Big Data," he observed, even though telcos have plenty of customer data at their fingertips.
Several panelists also advised service providers to take consumer privacy and security concerns very seriously. In fact, they urged providers to embed privacy and security programs into their data analytics projects from the get-go to avoid potentially damaging network data breaches later on that could severely erode customer trust in their brands.
"If you don't address these kinds of concerns, don't address what the customer wants, it's going to come back to bite you.” Ann Cavoukian, Ryerson University
"If you don't address these kinds of concerns, don't address what the customer wants, it's going to come back to bite you," said Ann Cavoukian, executive director of Ryerson University's Privacy & Big Data Institute. "So take this seriously—the notion of trust is very important."
Cavoukian cited the $750 million class-action lawsuit filed against Bell Canada in April for allegedly tracking what its cellphone customers browsed on the Internet and selling the information to advertisers without customers' permission as a prime example of what can go wrong in the consumer privacy area. “Telus is great at that (putting the customer first), Bell not so much," she said.
David Ritter, a partner and managing director at the Boston Consulting Group, recommended that service providers take the time and care to learn how to analyze and interpret their data in a meaningful way. He noted that a friend at Harvard Business School has half-jokingly told him that the key is to hire economists, not statisticians, because economists know how to interpret data in the proper context.
"There are good ways and bad ways to interpret Big Data," he said. "The math is important. But understanding how to apply that math is probably much more important."
