The Rise of Dashboards in the Telecommunications Industry

Nelson Ng, October 15th, 2012

Introduction
The term dashboard is as overused today as it is misunderstood. What exactly are dashboards? Are they just screens with fancy charts and graphics on them, or do they serve a greater purpose? This document seeks to explain what problems well-executed dashboards solve and what benefits they provide within the context of the telecommunications industry. The easiest way to understand what role dashboards play in the industry is to examine some of the questions that professionals are asking.

Problems
How do we proactively prevent customer attrition? What are the top and most current reasons that customers are leaving, and how might we respond to these dynamics? Can we proactively spot trends and possible issues in our billing system that could have an impact on churn? How do we identify and profile customers according to their opportunities and risks? Why are some customers not as profitable as others? Are our products right-sized for these customers according to their risk profile? How do we maximize the effectiveness and efficiency of our targeted marketing campaigns? How can we gain a better understanding of usage, behavior and demography? What are the relationships between products, product groupings and customer segments? How do we price and bill for our data services? The intensity and frequency of disruption that is experienced in this industry due to new technologies, converging product lines, regulatory changes, economic volatility, and fierce and evolving competition has created an insatiable appetite for data. It is no longer sufficient to merely respond; telecommunications organizations need to proactively target problems before they occur and pursue opportunities as soon as they emerge. This need is reflected in the rapid growth of the business intelligence industry, which is predicted to

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reach $13 billion in annual revenue in 2012, up from $11.5 billion in 2011 (Gartner, 2012).

The goal of business intelligence (BI) is to deliver actionable information to people in an organization in order to facilitate better decision making. However, merely acquiring, storing and making data accessible is insufficient; data only becomes meaningful when it is understood by the person who receives it. The means by which people consume data can be broken down into three types, and while their individual distinctiveness is becoming increasingly blurred due to convergence, they each serve separate and distinct purposes.

Types of Data Presentation

Reports are most popular form of presenting and summarizing data, because they are the easiest to create. While they are typically dominated by text and tables, they can also include data graphics. The purpose of a report is to provide a highly flexible and unconstrained means of presenting and consuming data in any form. Reports can fit into a single screen or span many pages. Analytic visualizations have become increasingly popular years as new technologies and improved computing power have afforded highly interactive and graphical ways of exploring data. These specialist-oriented tools are generally used by financial, business and data analysts and power users to explore the vast breadth and depth of datasets in a free-form environment. Analytic visualizations serve to allow people to explore, discover and analyze data, without being constrained to a specific sequence or order in which they have to access their data. People who use analytic visualizations often dont know what to look for or how to look for it; they use these tools to discover relationships that might not have already been identified. Dashboards, on the other hand, are designed to present data and causal relationships that have already been identified so they can be monitored without requiring effort or interactivity. In a single, purpose-built and concise screen, dashboards only contain the most essential data required to achieve organizational objectives and solve the problems that its intended users face. The purpose of a dashboard is to allow people to rapidly monitor relevant and critical information at a glance, provide sufficient detail for context and analysis, and provide a fast and easy way of drilling-down to more detail. As a result, the effectiveness of a dashboard is heavily dependent on how well it is designed for its intended audience. While dashboards are becoming increasingly interactive, the effectiveness of a dashboard can be measured by the reduction of effort and time required to achieve insight.

Benefits of Dashboards
The benefits that dashboards bring to the telecommunications industry are manifold. Here are some of the most common: Improve customer retention by providing workers and managers better and more-relevant information from multiple systems at a glance, and, crucially, prescribing possible and profitable solutions to well-known problems. Proactively increase customer loyalty. Every interaction with a customer is an opportunity to proactively

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improve their propensity to stay and right-size their products to maximize profitability and minimize the risk of churn. Equip every individual that has a connection to a customer with information about lifetime value, profitability, usage, behavior, demography, customer service interactions, noteworthy billing issues, eligibility for promotions and campaigns, and possible risks. Create a holistic perspective of the customer. Information is traditionally segregated by accident of its mode of production, system, or department. Reduce information lag and create a more comprehensive and complete profile of the customer by providing a well-rounded profile that incorporates data from all relevant sources. Encourage consistency by creating a single version of the truth. Avoid needless conflicts between departments, managers and analysts about whose version of the data is correct by creating a single source of information that everybody in the business uses. Consolidate and manage business rules, definitions, metrics and terms to increase coordination and eliminate wasted effort. Reduce costs without sacrificing productivity and revenue generation by automating the process of presenting data, reducing the amount of time spent on producing content, and thereby increasing the amount of productive time spent analyzing and making better decisions. Empower people across the organization by giving them access to information and strategy. Help get IT departments out of the business of creating content for the business, so they can focus on developing and maintaining systems. This gives business users with average technical abilities a tremendous amount of power to act in a positive way on information. Gain corporate alignment and operational dexterity by empowering individuals with sufficient information to react and confidently solve problems in a manner that is consistent with corporate strategy and consistent across the organization. Dashboards can guide and inform minor strategic course corrections, and also provide a standardized means to communicate and monitor these changes.

Conclusion
Dashboards serve a unique and important purpose within the telecommunications industry by providing workers of all technical abilities across the organization with decision-supporting information, delivered rapidly on computers and mobile devices, in an easy-to-use manner. The succinct and highly purpose-built nature of dashboards requires an exceptional amount of industry experience, knowledge of the data domain and specialized technical expertise to design, implement and provide training for. In addition, the technologies that are required to rapidly deliver the content in visual and interactive form across stationary and mobile devices require purpose-built software. Dundas Data Visualization, Inc. provides customized dashboard solutions delivered by a talented and experienced team of business consultants, project managers, software developers and interface designers, using a unique engagement model that emphasizes and prioritizes end-user adoption. Dundas visualization technologies have been used globally for 20 years, and have been incorporated into products like Microsoft SQL Server, SharePoint and Visual Studio. Dundas dashboard development product, Dundas Dashboard, was born out of its years of consulting and purpose-built to elegantly and effectively solve the unique needs and requirements of dashboard projects.

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