What’s up this week? Dirty data, data about data, and Big Data.
How Dirty is Your Data?
In Coming Clean on Dirty Data, Ray Le Maistre of Light Reading reminds us that the biggest challenge to transforming OSS over the last 10+ years has been data quality:
The telcos don’t know how much information they have and the data they do have is only 40-80% accurate at best. They don’t know where all their stuff is, what lines they have or where, and don’t know what services they are delivering, or to whom. It’s amazing they are in business.
Check out his post here, which includes a couple of links to other articles on this perennial topic.
What Keeps the Telco Execs Awake at Night?
On a similar topic, research commissioned by Comptel found that 82% of telco CMO/CIO/CTOs say ideally they would either consolidate every department’s data sets or at least collaborate on business decision-making, only 16% cited having a fully integrated OSS/BSS working from a common centralised data source.
The survey also highlighted attitudes to the Big Data trend: 64% said that their departments are using it for customer service; The majority of respondents noted that customer demographic (68%), network information (66%) and social interactions (64%) are required for effective decision-making.
You can download the research paper here.
More Telco Big Data
cVidya announced support for the Hadoop platform, which enables processing of very large data sets in a distributed computing environment with the aim of dramatically expanding Fraud Management, Revenue Assurance and Marketing Analytics capabilities. The new solution also reduces the need for conventional data warehouses. cVidya estimates that Hadoop could enable customers to cut their hardware licensing costs by approximately 70%.
While cVidya is mainly a BSS vendor, specifically offering Revenue Assurance solutions, this trend for OSS/BSS vendors in general to offer Big Data solutions is worth watching. We are at the start of a big refresh of product lines as the industry jumps on the Big Data bandwagon.