With big data reaching its peak on the hype-meter, TM Forum is focusing efforts on how to use big data analytics to improve customer experience and enable business growth. Today, service providers face the challenges of how to deliver effective analytics to underpin business growth and a great digital experience across any device at any time. These topics and more were the focus of TM Forum’s first Big Data Analytics Summit in Amsterdam last week, where more than 150 executives from 85 companies, including 25 service providers from 25 countries, gathered to discuss and debate the tricks of the big data trade.

TM Forum’s Big Data Analytics Summit, held Jan. 29-30, 2013, at the Movenpick Hotel in Amsterdam’s City Center, featured big data analytics leaders, such as Capgemini, eBay, EE, France Telecom-Orange, Google, Microsoft Corp., Splunk, Telefónica, Teradata, Verizon and more. Video coverage, speaker insight and interviews from the summit floor are now available on TM Forum’s Digital Services Initiative Channel.

Big Data Analytics Summit attendees took away plenty of insight on key issues, such as:

• The role of corporate culture—the need to embed data analytics in the DNA of a service provider business as the way to make the right decisions, measure customer experience and empower product managers
• The need for process, tooling and technology change to underpin effective analytics, and establishing new partnerships between IT and business;
• The risk of measuring the wrong thing—designing and establishing metrics that measure the real customer experience, and how to enable data access that can facilitate decision making in near real-time;
• The knowledge drought—the lack of available big data experts on the latest database and analytics technologies, and how to overcome these challenges.

TM Forum is already making progress in creating a set of tools and best practices to help service providers take on many of these challenges. A new Customer Experience Management Index defines and weighs critical KPIs for effective customer experience, and is enabled by effective big data analytics to gather and process data from a range of sources.

In addition, TM Forum’s new Customer Experience Maturity Model helps service providers understand and evaluate their programs through an assessment of six attributes of a program on five different levels. TM Forum is also looking closely at the challenges of big data analytics for digital services delivered in a multi-cloud environment, and how data can be aggregated between partners to increase its value.

“Big Data may be at the top of the hype curve, but it’s for good reason,” said Nik Willetts, chief strategy officer, TM Forum. “In the digital world, effective analytics are at the heart of understanding customer behavior, experience and spending decisions. Today’s traditional reactive measurements from customer exchanges via a call center, trouble desk, billing enquiries or customer surveys don’t cut it. Understanding the user’s experience means understanding the totality of consuming a service, whether it’s a voice call, streaming video on a mobile device, or enterprise services. Getting this picture isn’t easy, and our Summit was the first step in gaining consensus on the issues the industry needs to take on together.”

Already, TM Forum is bringing together the industry with its Big Data Analytics program, to establish best practices for data analytics including a reference model, technology survey, guidebook and key indicator and business metrics infrastructure specifications. To get involved, contact Steve Cotton, director, Business Assurance Programs, TM Forum, at scotton@tmforum.org.

The next stop for TM Forum’s Big Data Analytics Summit will be at Management World 2013, held May 13-16 at the Acropolis Convention Center, Nice, France, with a three-day dedicated Big Data Analytics Forum as part of the 3,500 person event.

About TM Forum

TM Forum is a global, non-profit association focused on enabling service provider agility and innovation. As an established thought-leader in complex service management, the Forum serves as a unifying force across industries, enabling more than 950 member companies to solve critical business issues through access to a wealth of knowledge, practical tools, best practices and standards.

The Forum provides a fair and safe environment for collaboration across the value-chain to overcome the barriers to a vibrant, open digital economy. We help member companies of all sizes gain a competitive edge by enabling efficiency and agility in their IT and operations while protecting competitive differentiation. For more information about TM Forum, visit www.tmforum.org.