David Neuhaus, Director of Product Management, Telcordia

Nodes and ports exist in your network but not in your inventory.  A service exists in your inventory but not in your network.  A circuit exists in both places but its configuration does not match.  Your boss is not happy. 

The explanation you give your boss has something to do with an explosion.  An explosion of network data.  Why? Because, you say, that services are getting too complex and “virtualized” and because of the distributed nature of the underlying, next generation networks.  Next you report that this data is spreading like a virus to other systems and organizations within your company.   You offer to perform a massive data clean-up, but you and your boss both know that data tend to become inconsistent over time after being used by various systems with no common stewardship or validation rules.  You are in trouble.  But you are not alone.

Inconsistent data can damage your business.  On average, 70% of provisioning fallouts are attributed to “bad data” and upwards of 30% of network assets are typically stranded or “lost.” Poor data integrity leads to revenue leakage, difficulty in troubleshooting service disruptions and poor decision making.  But what impact does this have on your customers? Consistency across the many moving parts of emerging operational environments is crucial in providing a satisfactory customer experience. But operators cannot provide a consistent customer experience if they don’t have a consistent view of data across the enterprise. Accurate operational data is critical in mitigating service order fallout and when troubleshooting service disruptions. One example is the excessive service restoration intervals caused by discrepancies in inventory data. In this context, a discrepancy can be the result of either having multiple inventory systems with overlapping, out-of-sync information, or having ‘as-planned’ inventory data out-of-sync with the ‘as-built’ view of the network. 

Your path to accurate data begins with three steps.  The first step is to consolidate inventory systems to ensure you rely on one database of record. This will help mitigate data overlap. The second step is to fully integrate the consolidated system with the rest of your operational environment to better manage data across loosely coupled systems. Finally, you must equip the resulting platform with data integrity management capabilities. The goal is to promote a better flow of data so that inventory data automatically reflects not only the results from service activation, service assurance and other operational processes, but also the reconciled view of all identified discrepancies.

Discrepancies will occur no matter what, as a result of which Data Integrity Management must be an on-going process. There is no other way to maintain an accurate picture of ever changing services and networks. By mechanizing and automating pathways of data flow within the enterprise, along with checks and balances to ensure the integrity of the data, operational visibility is improved to the point where service providers can be more proactive when it comes to avoiding service order fallout and services outages. This improved flow of more accurate data also energizes the business for more relevant decision making, and it provides a solid base from which to operate and focus on all customer needs.  Now your boss is happy – and you’re out of trouble.

For more information, please contact David Neuhaus, Director Product Management, Telcordia, at dneuhaus@telcordia.com or download our new white paper, Realizing True Data Integrity with Automated Discrepancy Management and visit our website.