CIOIN

Amrita Gangotra

Director-IT ( India & South Asia), Bharti Airtel

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Amrita Gangotra is the Director-IT ( India & South Asia) for Bharti Airtel.

Information is wealth. Today, organizations are generating hordes of data, and therefore it is extremely important to know how to capture it and know what to do with it to stay ahead of the competition. That’s where analytics can help. BI or analytics is unlike a typical technology project. It is, in fact, more of a business transformation project because business and IT work together to help their organizations meet defined goals.

Business needs to identify information that requires to be analyzed to gain business insights. For example, in the telecom sector, we deal with two distinct streams of customers: The end-consumer and large and SMB enterprises. Analyses of their usage patterns, network performance, services consumption, etcetera, is paramount to figure out what directly impacts business revenue. Once requirements and objectives are well defined, it’s IT’s job to locate the actual data, integrate it, figure out what type of architecture to build, and what tools to use. This is why it is imperative that business and IT work together.

To ensure the effective use of analytics, I feel that IT should implement data de-duplication at the designing stage itself. CIOs need to define source systems and decide where data will be stored. Instead of duplicating data from different platforms, CIOs should take data from source systems to be used by various data marts and analytical warehouses in formats that business logic requires.

"For information to be captured near real-time, CIOs need to have the ability to mine data as close to the event as possible. "

I also feel that analytics make more sense when you are able to react immediately after an incident has occurred. For example, if a customer’s call drops four times in a patchy network area, organizations should be able to identify the trigger and target that customer for a promotional campaign in near real-time. This enhances customer satisfaction effectively.

For information to be captured near real-time, CIOs need to have the ability to mine data as close to the event as possible. And to do that effectively, they need a higher degree of technology enablement and higher levels of automation. CIOs need to design and architect their systems so that they are able to carry out deep packet inspection and put processes in place that help them gather information as and when events occur. This will make analytics much more meaningful to businesses.