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John Joseph

Vice President, Product Marketing

I saw an interesting discussion topic on the MDS Lavastorm Analytics LinkedIn group on our ability to predict whether a customer on a service plan will or won’t pay their bill. A subsequent blog post outlined some of the criteria that lead to failure to pay.  Interestingly, the list of factors included factors based on usage (including usage or related, but different products), payment patterns, product selection, and interactions with the customer through various customer contact channels.  For example, the list of common predictors  included:

• A customer lowers or limits their service plan
• The amount the customer is expected to pay changes significantly
• Unusually high service consumption in the middle of a billing cycle
• A pattern of non-payment

When we improve customer and billing processes with the Lavastorm Analytics Platform at major service companies, we also find that root cause analysis of the order-to-bill process and, specifically, the cause of credits and bill adjustments, also indicates whether payment delays should be expected.   When looking at these processes, the following cases are important:

• Errors in the point of sale process – Many issues arise when a person purchases a service, but they receive an invoice that doesn’t seem to match what they ordered.  Sometimes everything is correct and the customer just cannot understand the bill, but in other cases, the bill may be incorrectly calculated or the product may not have been sold properly.
• Unexpected billing miscalculations – If billing miscalculations reach the invoice and the customer, payment delays go up.  Catching these errors before the invoice is calculated not only eliminates payment delays, but also eliminates calls to customer service representatives for clarification/adjustments.
• Known billing miscalculations for new services – A company striving to shorten time to market for a new service may introduce the service before the billing system has been modified to correctly calculate the bill.  In this case, high bill amounts may be misleading because an adjustment has been expected all along to correct the bill.

Aside from what you should monitor, it is also important to consider how you should monitor failure-to-pay indicators.  First, it should be obvious from these lists that predicting bill payment behavior will require you to consider data from multiple sources, including usage systems, billing systems, and customer support systems.  All of this needs to be unified and evaluated for you to get an accurate view of customer behavior and likelihood to pay.  Second, monitoring some indicators, including usage, requires observations between billing period and, ideally, on a continuous, or real-time, basis so that you can get an early warning of how current behavior compares to past behavior or to business rules, such as the maximum plan minutes.

What else is needed to predict failure to pay?  I look forward to your comments.

John Joseph

Vice President, Product Marketing

As analytics play a larger role in many organizations, the analytics profession itself is also changing.  A number of people who contributed to the MDS Lavastorm Analytics Community on LinkedIn expect there to be a number of major changes in store for business analysts and data analysts in 2012.  The group thought the major trends and changes on the horizon are:

• A shortage of analytic professionals (business analysts, data analysts, data scientists, BI analysts, etc.) will become evident. Aside – there is a great definitions of analytic professional roles on modernanalyst.com.
• More focus on the “analytic profession” within an organization. Those with a base set of technical skills (excel, SQL, etc), a strong business / process knowledge, and most importantly, a curiosity / motivation about data & analytics will be in the driver’s seat and will thrive.
• Empowered by easy to use and visual interfaces, non-PhD analysts will use software to apply sophisticated modeling and algorithmic techniques to large and small data sets.
• A requirement for more classes and training at companies and at universities.

With a shortage clearly upon us, organizations need to address what to do in the short term.  In my experience, the dominant model seems to make information available in interfaces that are visual and that a normal business users can learn and use without much trouble and to have more-technical folks within the business units take on a role as data integrator and publisher.  This way the business can still do the heavy lifting if IT doesn’t have the bandwidth to respond to the business needs, but the information is made broadly available to decision makers regardless of their technical skill so that the information can have the greatest impact on the business.

John Joseph

Vice President, Product Marketing

Over the past few weeks, one of the hottest discussions on the MDS Lavastorm Analytics Community on LinkedIn has been the top predictions for 2012.  In fact, it was probably one of the hottest topics posted for all of 2011.  The sheer number and variety of the predictions indicates that the business analytics (a.k.a. business intelligence/BI) world is alive with innovation, new technologies, and investment.

We recently published our own view on the major changes or trends in 2012 on IT Business Edge.  They were:

1. A Shift in Analytical Power – IT and business groups will work more collaboratively as the business insists on more analytical power and ownership. Self-service BI/analytics options will continue to grow in numbers.
2. A Focus on Trust – To address compliance and auditing requirements organizations will put more emphasis on processes and controls, such as visualizations for data forensics, that build trust in the data among IT, the executive team, and business managers.
3. A New Wave of Discovery – increased awareness and acceptance of visual query tools will make the concepts of data exploration and discovery a much bigger part of an organization’s BI portfolio.
4. Real-Time Analytics, Real-Time Action – As BI and analytics get pushed to more business users, companies will strive to shorten the time from an insight to a business process change.
5. Big Data Moves from Science to Reality – Instead of Big Data “science projects”, we’ll start to see organizations integrate Big Data analytics into their standard BI organizations/processes.

You can read a bit more on these trends here: Top Five Business Intelligence Predictions for 2012.

In addition to those trends some other predictions that showed up in the MDS Lavastorm Analytics group see the following changes to how analytics are created and consumed:

• Organizations will create Big Data sets that bring together data typically disconnected from the IT-governed data processes, including CRM, social media and web analytics data.
• Greater use of predictive analytics.  For example, predictive analytics will be combined with new data sources, such as social network analytics, to detect and reduce fraud in health care and other industries.
• A greater convergence of emerging technologies, such as predictive analytics available in the cloud and consumed anytime anywhere on mobile devices.

With changes and trends of this magnitude, it begs the question, “What isn’t changing?”  One thing is clear.  There is a growing passion that data is critical to decisions and that analytics can help businesses respond better to changes including the changing needs of their customers and partners.  As MDS Lavastorm Analytics looks to 2012 and beyond, our mission remains on course to help leading companies analyze, optimize and control business processes to drive greater business performance through discovery-driven business and data analytics.  We are planning our investments accordingly to keep the Lavastorm Analytics Platform on the cutting edge of business analytics that give business users visibility to diverse, siloed data and across fractured business processes.

John Joseph

Vice President, Product Marketing

Earlier this week I spent a day with a telecommunications service provider that is also a thought leader in revenue assurance.  We discussed how they got to the point where they had generated many millions of dollars in cost savings and additional revenue.  Out of that discussion came a number of best practices for getting your revenue assurance initiative on track.

If you aren’t familiar with revenue assurance, it is the process of analyzing bills against services rendered to ensure that the bill isn’t leaving money on the table – either in the case where you are paying your suppliers too much money or you aren’t billing your customers enough.  This is a big deal in telecom, but the same principles can be applied to any business where bills are issued against service plans, such as bills for healthcare, cable and internet, streaming radio services, etc.  During the discussion we identified five keys to revenue assurance success: (more…)

Matt Hooper

Chief Marketing Officer, MDS

This post has been inspired, in some small amount, by IBM’s suggestion that businesses are unable to analyze over 90% of their data.

Jeff Jonas, IBM chief scientist for the entity and analytics group, has suggested that “as computers are getting faster, organizations are getting dumber – they are now lucky to fully understand seven percent of their data and this is steadily getting worse.” The data analytics equivalent to the age old question, “What comes first, the chicken or the egg?” is “What comes first, the analytic solution or the business requirements.

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John Joseph

Vice President, Product Marketing

TM Forum’s Management World Americas just wrapped up a very productive event in sunny Orlando.  This year’s theme was The Innovation Race, Fueling New Revenue.  As always, the event was a great opportunity to catch up on the current issues circulating in the telecommunications industry.  As a proponent of information-based decision making, I was thrilled to see the level to which analytics is now dominating the conversation in the telecom industry.  In both one on one conversations with service providers and in the conference presentations put on by industry visionaries and vendors, the need to use information to improve the business was by far THE most dominant theme.

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Matt Hooper

Chief Marketing Officer, MDS

For those of you that have seen the movie ‘Big Wednesday’ you will know that it is an iconic 70’s coming of age movie centred on change and surfing large waves. Big Wednesday is the day when the biggest waves or sets come in.  For some time now there has been a growing swell around the area of analytics in the communications market and we are now seeing a wave of both vendor and service provider activity, as well as in the TM Forum, that is creating considerable excitement. So why is this? (more…)

Rob Smith

Senior Product Manager, MDS

Matt Hooper

Chief Marketing Officer, MDS

Currently, CSPs face a problem as they are constrained by high numbers of legacy systems in their back office. This leads to high volumes of product, service and functional silos, meaning that there is no ‘single view’ of customers or services (a concept talked about in the industry for several years), and as a result, this creates increased customer experience complexity for the CSPs. (more…)

Communications service providers are jeopardising revenues with business customers by failing to provide clear visibility of spend for mobile, fixed line telephony and broadband services.  Gaining better control of existing costs is more important than reducing overall spend, while most telecoms managers said they would like to better understand the way in which their company communicates. (more…)