Blogging from Istanbul

I just got back from Istanbul where I had the pleasure of participating in the the ETIS Community gathering entitled “Data is King – the Key Asset for Future Telco Business.” This was a really interesting two-day conference with presentations from Deutsche TeleKom, Croatian Telecom, TurkCell, TeliaSonera, Belgacom, CYTA, and OTE – and that was just in the BI working group, only one of several sub-groups that met this week. It was one of those conferences where you wish you could be in three rooms at once because there was so much great information shared.

One of the things I liked best was the amount of sharing between the operating companies in different countries. Although everyone was at different levels of maturity, there were great ideas to be learned from each other. Even the last slide of the last presentation by Karlis Patjanko from Lattelecom had a key learning about leveraging what users like. His example was that if users like Excel, let them use Excel in analyzing their business – but you can still invest in data management while giving them tools they like. I am a little prejudice about this because I have been working with Microsoft to create solutions that …

Another great presentation was by Achim Klabunde the Director General for European Commission Information Society and Media. His insight into the Commission’s approach and rationale for it privacy rules was very enlightening. Having just spent 10 days with leading Telecommunications companies all over Europe and having heard the entire spectrum of strategies about using customer data, this presentation enable me to understand how these companies can operate so differently under the same set of rules. Achim also did a great job of explaining some of the myths about the EU privacy rules explaining the realty was often different than the expectation.

Iiker Kuruoz, the CIO of Turkcell, welcomed the community to Istanbul and demonstrated the power of location based analysis and the data that could be used in developing marketing strategy and improving the customer experience. Before I left for this European trip I realized that I was going to about 8 countries where my knowledge of Spanish, French and Portuguese would be of no value, so I downloaded a translation app for my iPhone. If that app could have looked at network data and automatically switched to the language I needed that day, it would have been so powerful. So I think we are at the early stages of the integration of network information and powering our communications devices.

Overall, this was a great conference and I am looking forward to participating again.

Paul Barrett

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