Business intelligence consists of the methods and applications used for collecting, storing and analyzing business data and for turning this data into actionable information. While business intelligence applications are widely deployed in the area of enterprise management, the translation of the methods and concepts of business intelligence to the specific case of telecommunications network resource management is an emerging field. Network business intelligence helps service providers answering fundamental questions on their network resources:
- Are my resources used efficiently? How can I improve usage of my assets and improve profitability or reduce capital expenditures?
- Where are my vulnerabilities in the network and how can I alleviate them?
- Whoe are my important customers and how do they use my network?
In addition to providing answers to those questions, network business intelligence applications should present the answers in a way that can be understood by the business user and that can be easily shared within the organization. Business intelligence applications have to address the needs of a broad audience with different application usage patterns and variable knowledge about the application.
Users can indeed be grouped into several categories. The most sophisticated users (power and expert users) have significant IT skills and/or expertise on the application. As they use intensively the application, they can easily maintain and expand their expertise. However the vast majority of users, many of them only occasional users of the application, do not have the same skills, nor do they want to spend large amounts of time and effort to acquire specific application level expertise. Those users need a simple to use interface that provides access to the information in the shortest possible time.
This means that:
- Information should be one click away. Navigation through rich submenus, cluttered with multiple options, distracts the user from the essential issue at hand.
- Information should be delivered through webservices. Dedicated client applications are not suited for widespread access to information within an organization.
Finally answers lead to more questions. A business intelligence solution should enable a user to explore the data without hindering the flow of thought that carries the succession of questions and answers.
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