The ideal CFO approach to advanced analytics

While implementing a comprehensive advanced analytics approach, modern day CFOs need to account for a few critical aspects. It has been widely witnessed that the current approaches Telcos are adopting are not giving them the best results, and the benefits have proven elusive for a lot of operators. Today, many Telcos are taking a very standard approach to leveraging their data wherein they extract the data, dump it into a Hadoop platform, apply analytic techniques upon it and generate insights based on the data. The major problem with the current approach is that the analytic tools which Telcos are currently using cannot scale up to the large volumes of data telecom operators possess and continue to generate, which is currently now in Zettabytes and is quickly moving towards the realm of Yottabytes.

Telecom CFOs need to identify and ensure that they have solutions in place that are capable of handling data of a telecom scale in order to ensure that they have a holistic data set to action upon.

CFOs who are looking to arm themselves with advanced analytics also need to understand and account for the shortage of data scientists.  This shortage has caused a substantial gap between data science supply and demand. And with the existing talent, the focus continues to move towards validation of the data and reporting, rather than what is truly essential, i.e., consuming insights and deciding the next course of action. This has led to a delay in assuring speed to actionable insights. In order to overcome this barrier, CFOs need to identify solutions which provide them with a Man + Machine approach, which includes the tools and algorithms to run analytics programs, and add a layer of human intervention in order to ensure that insights are relevant, timely and accurate.

More importantly, one of the major concerns operators have in terms of the insights they are currently generating lies in the fact that they are receiving insights in the form of dashboards that cannot be consumed by everyone across the organization. Rather than generic reporting, the focus needs to on generating data analytics that can be easily consumed at multiple levels. This can be solved through the generation of ‘storyboards’ - which provide only relevant insights in a democratized manner - instead of ‘dashboards’. While dashboards are indeed important for analysis, one cannot reach the right business conclusion when they have different dashboards as a part of their operations. By taking a storyboard approach for insight generation, CFOs can easily move beyond this obstacle to derive insights which are relevant and which can be consumed by executives across multiple levels.

Finally, CFOs, and Telcos in general, need to ramp up their analytics process to ensure that they achieve insights which not only focus on the ‘why’ of a problem, i.e. mere analytics insights. Rather CFOs need to change their approach towards getting insights on the ‘what’ and the ‘what next’ of problems – business insights. By moving their approach towards business insights, CFOs can bring predictability into decision making to proactively act on business problems and address potential risks. Through business insights, CFOs will truly be able to leverage their advanced analytics approach to make the best use of their information in order to have a 360-degree view of their business context and thereby identify and even predict issues, opportunities and threats proactively, and address them well before internal audits, as they traditionally used to do.

Looking at the landscape today, we can ascertain that traditional Telcos have been lagging behind in the area of analytics, which can lead to a slowdown in the derivation of business outcomes. What Telcos need are analytics solutions capable of helping CFOs derive outcomes in a period as short as 2-3 months, and for their vendors to take an experimentative approach to analytics rather than following a transactional delivery model.