B/OSS Europe: Avoiding the Temptation of Data

The person who designed the original, well-known interconnect system for a major U.K. carrier also designed another, less well-known system. It was a call analysis system, and it was 15 years ago. Being an extremely modest man, he made it sound like the easiest thing on earth to do. He also did it in his spare time. He could have made a fortune out of this piece of software but he decided not to.

At the time I made a comment that his bosses must have been very grateful. He smiled and said that, actually, they did not really know what to do with it. What they generally did, he said, was one of two things. Either they asked whether he could now deliver weekly call analysis reports in a nice green binder so that it matched the other market intelligence reports, or they spent hours over-analysing the data. Then they spent many more hours wondering why, for instance, the traffic between Dublin and Manchester spiked every Friday afternoon.

Nowadays I am sure it would be different. We are in an age of management by metrics and in the current recession, revenue assurance is in the spotlight again. Today there would be no green binders. Instead there would be Web-enabled dashboards with traffic lights and graphs. There would also be highly trained people worrying about the data.

As head of the Global Billing Association (GBA), I spent many hours worrying about data. I worried about what data and which key performance indicators (KPIs) and metrics are actually useful for service providers. The result of my worry and several meetings with carriers was the development of an extensive set of KPIs. As it turned out, it was far too extensive. There were more than KPIs, which increased to more than 60; the smorgasbord of KPIs finally peaked at close to 100. This demonstrated two things. First, that each carrier has a slightly different perspective of what is important to measure. Secondly, that trying to do things “by committee” is very hard work.