Testing

Author: Mark Jenkins

  • Plain Sailing on a Sea of Data

    Plain Sailing on a Sea of Data

    Running a business can be like sailing a ship.  It’s not enough to set a course and expect the ship to just get there.  The sea can be rough, the weather unpredictable, and just under the surface there may be hidden obstacles. Any number of problems can push you off course, or, at worst, sink your ship completely.  A sea of data washes around the business which can either drag you under, or carry you swiftly to your destination.  So what can you do to ensure a safe arrival at your destination?  The following checklist will help you get ready for your journey.

    A strong ship

    You will need a ship that can sail in all weathers, and has a reliable track record for sailing long distances.

    Subex has a pedigree of providing enterprise strength software to the telecoms industry for over 20 years. Subex ROC can crunch billions of call records daily

    A clear destination

    Without an agreed destination your business will drift aimlessly and will eventually run aground.  By setting clear objectives everyone can work together to ensure the ship stays the course.

    Subex consultants can help to plan for your voyage and set a course for you planned destination. Subex Analytics help to keep a business on course by using historic data to predict which direction a business is heading.

    A good map

    Your map is your business strategy, but this shouldn’t be set in stone.  A business strategy must adapt to the changing conditions and business leaders must remain vigilant to make course corrections when necessary.

    Subex ROC provides has a modularised framework that can be quickly adapted to handle new challenges or changes in course.  The course to follow can be mapped out in KPIs that provide constant visual feedback to inform you if your business goes off course.

    A navigator who knows the way

    Pick the right currents your ship will be carried quickly to your destination, but getting caught by the wrong ones can set you miles off course.  A business embarking on a journey into the unknown needs an experienced navigator to guide the way.

    Subex consultants have the experience to guide a corporation across open water or narrow straits of competition, regulatory requirements and market demands.

    As soon as sailors began to navigate beyond the sight of land then they realised they needed more than just the stars to find their way. Compasses, Nautical maps, sextants and marine chronometers all advanced the quality of analytics available to navigators, but until radar, LORAN and GPS arrived in the late 20th century sailors still relied largely upon dead reckoning and gut instinct to find the way, and their journeys would often end tragically.  Now Subex analytics can provide the same kind of objective view of where a business is heading that GPS provides for sailors.  Subex analytics can see through the fog and turbulent waves of data that flood into an organisation and threaten to knock you off course.  Using advanced time series forecasting, correlation, what if modelling, and pin sharp visualisations Subex ROC can navigate through a sea of data and help to steer your business safely to its planned destination.

  • A Digital Future for Everyone

    A Digital Future for Everyone

    Baroness Martha lane Fox, Internet pioneer and co-founder of lastminute.com,  has recently launched a campaign to try raise public and government awareness as to how the internet can benefit everyone, rather than just being a corporate billboard for advertising.   It is entitled DOT EVERYONE, a play on the .com extension used by commercial websites.

    As a business women in the late 90’s Baroness Fox realised the potential of the internet to provide an economical channel through which services could be delivered directly to the public.  Lastminute.com thrived on scooping up the unsold seats for holidays and west end shows and making them immediately available to the public with an easy to use search engine.  It was a business model that was uniquely suited to the internet, since it dealt with a data product that would become obsolete very quickly and targeted a geographically disparate market.  The internet provided the perfect channel through which such a product could be made available to a huge market in the minimum of time.  It is now Europe’s largest travel and leisure website.

    Today she is working to enlighten the British government and public as to how those characteristics of the internet that lastminute.com exploited could also serve the public good.  Her DOT EVERYONE campaign has three key strands

    1. To help educate all of us, from all walks of life, about the internet. The internet is the organising principle of our age, touching all our lives, every day. As the late activist Aaron Swartz put it, “It’s not OK not to understand the Internet anymore”.
    2. To put women at the heart of the technology sector. Currently there are fewer women in the digital sector than there are in Parliament.
    3. We (the British government) should aim for a much more ambitious global role in unpicking the complex moral and ethical issues that the internet presents.

    While these messages were aimed primarily at UK government, they are really aspirations that should apply equally to governments everywhere. In this blog I am looking at the first of those messages.  In order to “educate all of us”, it is essential that good internet services are made available to all of us.  Baroness Fox goes on to say

    “We need to make sure that those in power understand how the internet can help us redefine public services, improve the lives of the most vulnerable, bolster our economy.” 

    Key to this redefinition of public services is the usability of government websites.  By improving the usability of websites it is hoped many more interactions with government will happen as self-service transactions, resulting in substantial cost savings.  A good user experience can result in improved quality of service for much lower cost.   In a letter written to the government in 2010 Fox states

    “It seems to me that the time is now to use the Internet to shift the lead in the design of services from the policy and legal teams to the end users.”

    In other words, governments must cut through red tape and design services around user needs.

    Along with improving the quality of transactions on government websites it is also recommended that services should be made available through API’s such that external organisations can directly utilise government services, as well as making them more widely available to re-sellers.

    “We should put government transactional services and content where people spend their time on the web, rather than always expecting them to go to Directgov.” (government website)

    By exposing API’s to third party vendors then not only are external companies able to directly interface to those services, but they also able to offer them on to other consumers, thereby extending the reach of the service providers.  For example, Ebay and Facebook often carry ads for third party organisations that post their content via the Ebay and Facebook API’s.

    A third recommendation is that services should be centralised through a single portal.  This will improve ease of access, but will also result in removing duplication.

    The recommendations that Baroness Fox has made are already making a substantial difference to how consumers interact with government, and will continue to drive government to improve services and embrace the digital age.  In the words of Baroness Fox

    “What digital is about, what the internet allows, is a radical redesign of services. Cheaper, better, faster.”

    It’s a revolution that affects everyone.

  • Making the Connection

    Making the Connection

    risk of congestion

    It’s 7AM and I can’t put off getting up any longer, so I look out the window and see there’s a light frost on the grass, which the weather channel warned me about 3 days ago. An hour later I’m at the train station waiting for the 7:42 which is delayed because the frost has caused the points to seize up in a town 50 miles away, so now the entire South East rail system is completely snarled up. They predicted the weather and probably knew there would be a point’s failure, but still the network crashed. So I need to phone work to let them know I’m going to be late, but I can’t connect. Thousands of other commuters around me are also trying to phone ahead, but the network can’t handle it. It seems to happen every day.

    We are surrounded by events which are beyond our control, but often they happen in predictable ways. The points failure was perhaps less predictable than my alarm, but we always knew that when the temperature dropped there would be some kind of failure somewhere that would lead to cancellations and a breakdown of the network. We always knew that rush hour would become an agonising crawl into town on overcrowded trains. The congestion could probably have been avoided if they could have predicted which parts of the network were under the most stress and the impact on the network in the event of failure or congestion at those stress points. Additional resources could then be provided at those points, or alternative routes planned to bypass the congestion and limit the ripple out effect, like a fire break.  The problem is only likely to get worse, and the network more unreliable, as the population increases and more people than ever rely on the rail network to get to work.

    With the arrival of LTE and rapidly increasing popularity of Video on Demand then telecoms networks are also facing increasing levels of congestion and instability. Global data traffic is predicted to increase by 10 to 20 times by 2019 (Cisco).   In order to meet regulatory obligations and maintain customer experience Capex is set to spiral upwards. MNOs, who are already facing a year on year decrease in ARPU, will struggle to keep pace with demand and the risk of congestion will be ever present.

    As with rail networks MNOs need a longer term strategy in place to understand where and when future choke points in the network will occur so that the risk of congestion can be eliminated for the least cost. Subex Capacity Management provides the capability to predict these points of congestion by monitoring and correlating metrics from across the network to provide detailed forecasts of network utilisation. Additional factors can be brought into the forecasts, such as the impact of major events or the rolling out of M2M services and different scenarios played out to understand how the network will respond. By automating the forecasting process network managers can be alerted long before issues become critical and congestion begins to occur. They can evaluate different options for either re-homing traffic or augmenting the network for the least possible cost. Stranded or un-utilised assets can even be recovered and re-located to satisfy demand for very little cost.

    CFOs need to find ways to keep increasing revenue while controlling costs, and CTOs need to keep network delivering ever greater speeds as volumes of traffic increase exponentially.  Both need to look into the future to avoid a future of network instability, falling quality, crippling network costs and lost revenue.

  • The Pot of Gold at the End of the Network

    The Pot of Gold at the End of the Network

    Along with a thawing of the ground, March brought St Patrick’s day, a traditional Irish day of festivity in which everything Irish is celebrated. It’s also a great excuse to make green cookies and for the kids to dress up as leprechauns wearing shamrocks. In Irish mythology leprechauns are mischievous characters who love to play practical jokes, and keep a pot of gold hidden at the end of the rainbow. It takes a shrewd person to trick a leprechaun into giving up his gold. The search for the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow has become a popular way of describing the search for wealth and reward at the end of a journey.   In the world of network management there are rainbows everywhere, since networks are often full of stranded or underutilized assets at the far edges of the network.  Assets that are of great value, but hidden from view. The assets are hidden because they have been moved or not properly registered in inventory or Fixed Asset registers, and so they have become unusable since no one knows where they are.   The knock effects of this are felt throughout a service provider.

    Finance

    Don’t know the value of assets in the network so cannot provide accurate financial statements

    Marketing and Sales

    Don’t know what services the network can support or predict the cost will be for implementing new services

    Network Management

    Can’t manage the network optimally because assets cannot be re-purposed to augment network hotspots

    Order drop out from inconsistent and unreliable records

    These challenges not only affect the individual functional areas, but can result in open warfare between the groups. Network managers feel they must request ever bigger budgets to compensate for the extra demands being put on the network by new marketing initiatives, and finance fear they are being asked to throw money into a black hole with no possibility of understanding the return on investment. Without cross functional visibility of the companies network assets then suspicion and mistrust can develop between groups, which can cripple a company. Finance need to know if the assets they are purchasing are providing value to money, and marketing need to know if they can confidentially sell new services that will bring in extra revenue. Network managers want to know how they can provide the service required with ever tighter budgets.

    By utilizing automated network discovery network managers could re-build, or even create, an inventory that would give them a true picture of what was available in the network. A network discovery tool that could also understand how those assets were being utilized, which services were running on them, and how the network was connected together, could provide a way to optimally utilize every asset to provide a robust network for the least possible cost. When combined with an asset tracking and life cycle management tool such as Subex ROC AA then network discovery can give unprecedented level of visibility of where assets are located, how they are being used and what value they are bringing to the company.  ROC AA with network discovery can uncover the pot of gold hidden at the end of your network.

  • Spreadsheets and the Underwater Analyst

    Spreadsheets and the Underwater Analyst

    You’re an Analyst so you love data, right? Data is the oxygen of an organisation, but just as a living creature needs a heart and clean arteries to keep its oxygen infused blood flowing smoothly, an organisation also needs to maintain its systems and system interfaces to keep that data flowing smoothly and efficiently. As an analyst you will probably feel physical pain if your supply of data is cut off, and may even begin to experience panic attacks, but a good analyst will persevere in finding a cause of the blockage and find a way around it. That’s why we have spread sheets everywhere. Spread sheets are like virtual scuba tanks for an analyst, providing a personal supply of data to play around with in a world where the usual source is either unreliable to completely unavailable. What’s even worse is that the supply of data is generally under someone else’s control, which will often be your resident IT group. Need a report on Sales for a new product by region? Ask IT. Need the data on a daily instead of weekly basis? Better ask IT to change the extract. Need to know which customers are churning by a specific market segment? You guessed it.

    So you get a report to tell you everything about everything, stick it into a monster spread sheet and start to play. But then the data changes. It’s no longer relevant and you haven’t been able to get an update. You’re blind and the presentation is tomorrow morning! You are facing the same reality that countless organisations are facing across the globe, which is that data held in spread sheets and on laptops around the organisation starts turning stale as soon as it’s loaded, and that can lead to organisational paralysis. Despite the promise of flexibility and agility spread sheets can actually cause inflexibility, as functional silo’s become more divided and inter-functional processes break down.

    There must be a better way. If only the data was always to hand and you didn’t need to go to IT cap in hand to get a report that is obsolete before it’s delivered. If only you could get instant access to the data you need in an enterprise strength repository that automatically loads data 24/7, and then provides you with all the tools you need to transform, enrich, aggregate, correlate, forecast and generate beautiful charts to make sense of it all. Then imagine that the product that does all this is the core for a wide range of integrated solutions from billing to network management, asset assurance and cost management, and that you, or anyone else in the organisation, is now able to pull up to the minute analytics out from any those systems, as well as any other systems within your organisation, from one central portal. Then you would be looking at the Subex ROC, the powerhouse at the core of a comprehensive range of products that put control back in your hands.

  • The Importance of Peripheral Vision

    The Importance of Peripheral Vision

    The air is clear and fresh at 6000 feet, and I can see the snow covered roofs of the chalets in the valley below.  Just ahead a pristine white slope punctuated with a few hundred moguls’ presents a challenge for my knees and stamina, but also a whole lot of fun. From the top I pick my line, turn my skis to the edge, take a deep breath and push off.   My ski instructor has admonished me to keep my shoulders facing down the slope and not to run straight into the bumps, but go up the sides and pivot near the top such that I use the slope of the bump to control my speed. The first few turns go well but as the slope steepens so my speed increases I become focussed on one thing, which is just to stay in control. Then it happens. From out of nowhere another skier, even more out of control than me, is flying in from the right side on a collision course. My only course is to swerve to the left and straight into the nearly vertical face of big mogul I was hoping to avoid. The wipe out is messy and leaves me with one ski on and the other cheerfully bouncing away down the slope on its own.   As I stumble down the slope to retrieve my other ski I remember the other thing my ski instructor reminded me do, which was to always be mindful of my peripheral vision, since that how you avoid unpleasant surprises. It also made me think about the importance of peripheral vision in other areas of life. We typically think of peripheral vision as an ocular skill, but it’s also a great skill to develop when trying to steer a project or even an entire company through the bumps of market forces and competition.

    In their book ‘Peripheral Vision: Detecting the Weak Signals That Will Make or Break Your Company, Day and Schoemaker describe how successful companies often share one key characteristic, which is that they remain vigilant of the ‘weak signals’ that come from the edges of the organisation, and this allows them to be highly adaptive. It’s often the case that someone in an organisation knows about an issue that ‘blindsides’ a company long before it happens, but just didn’t have the right channels of communication to the person who needed to know. The problem isn’t lack of data, but lack of appropriate filtering to isolate the signals from the noise, and providing the channels through which that data can reach those strategic thinkers who are vigilant and can take action.  It’s not about what you know, but what you don’t know.

    Subex Ltd. developed the ROC, (Revenue Operations Centre), to not only sit at the centre of their suite of award winning products, but also to assimilate data ‘signals’ from all areas of a business to provide a high level view of those KPI which let executives know that things may not be going to plan. Through a combined process of ETL and data federation ROC provides a conduit through which those faint signals can be collected, amplified with advanced analytics, filtered, and then channelled in near real time to the right people.

    Executives need to ask the right questions. They need to ask why they didn’t know something was going to happen before it happened. To do that they need to improve their peripheral vision, keep vigilant and always be ready to act on the signals coming in from the edge of their business.