Page 519 - Handbook of Modern Telecommunications
P. 519

4-50                    CRC Handbook of Modern Telecommunications, Second Edition

              There are huge benefits of moving to a convergent BI environment that includes a single set of system
            modules, common infrastructure, and rapid introduction of new services. However, flexibility offered
            by the BI platform in transition from the current separate prepaid and postpaid systems to a convergent
            system is unprecedented. Most BI platforms allow transition in several ways, in accordance with the
            customer’s requirements. The approach can be a rapid transfer to a single convergent billing system, or
            phased, in a manner that guarantees benefits and ROI at each stage. BI provides a smooth migration
            path from legacy systems.
              Such platforms enable the service provider to nurture its prepaid customers through a unified cus-
            tomer  view,  sophisticated  offerings  for  next-generation  services,  and  enhanced  customer  services.
            Moreover, it can offer the benefits of maintaining a single billing system for prepaid and postpaid, with
            a single customer database, product catalog, and rating engine. The approach is effective across multiple
            functional areas and provides more efficient applications and services such as:
              •   Message acquisition and formatting
              •   Real-time charging environment
              •   Multidimensional rating
              •   Balance management
              •   Product catalog, development, and improvement
              •   Single customer data and billing

            4.3.9  Summary and Trends

            Today’s CDI systems have evolved into highly sophisticated applications incorporating leading-edge
            research and development advances in fields such as information theory, natural language processing,
            artificial intelligence, and others. One major advance has been the recognition of users’ needs to be able
            to fine-tune the matching and householding behavior to create a single customer view that more directly
            fits with the business needs.
              CDI vendors no longer assume that they can dictate to businesses what the “correct” single customer
            view is. As businesses have become increasingly sophisticated with business intelligence, CRM, and
            one-to-one systems, they have demanded control of their customer definition. This is typically affected
            via business rules that control how the single customer view is resolved by the CDI system.
              The BI and middleware vendors will collaborate with CDI vendors to provide tighter integration. In
            addition, given the importance of trustworthy data to both BI and CDI projects, trusted data sources will
            play a bigger role in the market. With most organizations investing big money in such initiatives and
            also opening up the system to Web self-service, salespeople entering data, field service entering data, and
            call centers entering data, the data can become corrupted pretty quickly. Rather than argue over which
            department’s data is right, companies will look to trusted data sources to append or be the source of
            record for customer information. These data vendors are offering more services to the CDI market today,
            and in the future they may be more aggressive in this area. While companies grapple with CDI, many are
            also implementing business intelligence tools, and these technologies will meet in the middleware.
              Competitive Intelligence (CI) is a specialized branch of business intelligence and has become an
            important initiative in the present competitive scenario. Next to knowing all about your own business,
            the best thing to know about is the other fellow’s business.
              Competitive intelligence is defined as a systematic and ethical program for gathering, analyzing,
            and managing external information that can affect your company’s plans, decisions, and operations. In
            other words, CI is the process of ensuring competitiveness in the marketplace through a greater under-
            standing of competitors and the overall competitive environment. CI is not as difficult as it sounds.
            Much of what is obtained comes from sources available to everyone, including government sources,
            online databases, interviews or surveys, special interest groups (such as academics, trade associations,
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