As big data and analytics become a more integral part of telecom operations from customer care and engagement to the network, the question arises of how companies deal with data from a leadership and strategy perspective.
A recent report from Forrester Research said that of more than 3,000 companies surveyed around the world, only 45% have a chief data officer. But of the companies that do appoint someone as a CDO, 54% have 10% or greater year-over-year revenue growth, as reported by InformationWeek — suggesting that companies who put a strategic leadership emphasis on data perform better.
Still, many experts who deal with big data in telecoms specifically say that the deployment and integration of big data analytics still happens largely based on departmental use cases rather than being pursued as a company-wide effort to better leverage its information for internal or external-facing applications.
Matt Roberts, marketing director for Amdocs, said that the emergence of chief data officers in telecom was expected but has not materialized. He remembers speaking at a conference last year and telling the audience that he’d never met one – and one audience member raised his hand and said he was CDO for BT, but had started the day before. Roberts noted that other industries, such a health care and finance, are still more likely to have CDOs than telecom.
“There isn’t that one chief data officer or C-level role at many of the telcos yet,” Roberts said. “It still hasn’t materialized. Everything is driven departmentally.” So speaking on big data strategy and applications still largely happens at the departmental or business group level, he added. Roberts said that this has shaped how Amdocs positions its offerings. The company has correspondingly expanded the applications for its big data analytics platform in such a way as to aim at specific departmental use cases rather than being able to offer products to a single executive who is in charge of all of a company’s big data initiatives.
A year ago, according to IDC analyst Elisabeth Rainge, she thought that by now the industry would’ve seen the emergence of a chief data officer, at the very least within network teams or IT teams. However, she thinks that due to geopolitical reasons, “it seems less likely that operators are going to drive a centralized strategy for big data and analytics.”
Instead, Rainge said, the network and IT teams who need better information to do their jobs are more likely to see “smart systems” that have some level of analytics and better data collection built in, in order to help organizations within the carriers do their jobs better within a broad range of roles.
Telecom companies may also be approaching the role of chief data officer as a collaborative effort.
Scott Sumner, VP of product development and marketing at Accedian Networks, says that operators who are successfully driving the use of analytics as the nervous system of their overall operations (including their networks) have taken innovative approaches such as pairing a CMO and CTO to figure out how best to leverage analytics on both the network and customer sides.
“The companies that I’ve seen do this successfully made a massive corporate shift,” Sumner said. “They used SDN and NFV as a disruptor, as a way to catalyze organizational change. They said, ‘Well, this is a massive change in the network, a major shift, and we’re going to use it as a break point to reorganize. It has to happen now, it’s a good excuse and we’re going to do it.”
