Telecommunications

[Jane B]

Telstra gets new CIO, again

Key IT transformer John McInerney promoted to chief information officer.

Howard Dahdah 06/11/2008


Telstra has announced a C-level restructure of its top IT decision makers that will see John McInerney promoted to chief information officer and Tom Lamming to the new role of senior vice president, transformation.

McInerney’s position takes effect immediately and is on a full-time basis.

According to a statement from the company, Lamming’s position will see him retain oversight of Telstra's IT transformation, which was announced in November 2005.
McInerney will report to Lamming, while Lamming will continue reporting to Greg Winn, Telstra's chief operations officer.

McInerney joined Telstra five years ago and had been executive director, information technology since mid-2007.
"John McInerney is an immensely capable executive who has been integrally involved throughout Telstra's transformation program. He has led many of the world-leading IT changes we have made at Telstra,” chief executive officer Sol Trujillo said.

McInerney began his career at Price Waterhouse Coopers (PwC) before moving over to the Datum Group, a local IT consultancy and systems integrator, in which during his decade there headed up its business intelligence practice before becoming its CEO.

Telstra’s CIO position has been a hot seat of late. McInerney replaces Tom Lamming who only came on board early last year after the high profile signing of ex-Qantas CIO Fiona Balfour in February 2006 lasted only 10 months. Prior to Balfour the CIO was Vish Padmanabham who was appointed in April 2005.

[Steve Bennett]

PR Release:

Forrester Research reports that Telenor, the world's seventh largest mobile phone company, has improved retention results by 36% while spending 40% less on marketing. This was achieved through uplift modelling where only those likely to be persuaded are targetted in marketing campaigns. According to Portrait Software's Dr Mark Smith, in a 'stressed' economy, more for less is possible, particularly with customer retention campaigns powered by Uplift Modelling.

11/12/2008 16:18:00


Independent research firm states that marketers are increasingly turning to predictive analytics to power retention programs.

Henley-on-Thames, UK – December 11, 2008 – In a recent study titled “Optimizing Customer Retention Programs (October 20, 2008), Forrester Research profiled next generation uplift analytics and its impact on optimising customer retention. According to the report “Uplift modeling is an emerging technique that can help marketers improve the performance of their customer retention programs.” The report found that one marketer used this new technique to achieve results 36% better than traditional analytics, with 40% less marketing costs.

According to next generation marketing industry expert Dr. Mark Smith, executive vice president of Portrait Software, a down economy is the driver behind companies striving to trim costs wherever possible and elevating customer retention to the top of priority lists. Said Smith, “Traditionally identifying those likely to churn and then directing attention to that group of customers has been at the centre of customer retention initiatives. As the Forrester report highlights, “simply looking at likelihood of churn isn’t sufficient to power retention programs.” Suresh Vittal, Principal Analyst at Forrester Research writes, “Emerging techniques like uplift modelling can help marketers do more than identify churners. This helps marketers to narrow programs to only focus on customers who will react positively.”

Uplift Modeling Sometimes discussed using different names; differential response analysis, incremental impact modelling, net modelling, incremental response modelling and true response modelling, Uplift modelling separates "true" responses to campaigns from purchases that would have been likely to happen anyway. Uplift modelling determines the increase in the probability that each customer will buy (or stay) when they would otherwise not have done so. As a key revelation exposed by the approach, marketers can now see which prospects are likely to ignore the offer and which are likely to use it as a trigger to defect.

Cut unnecessary marketing spend; improve marketing ROI Smith comments that the ability to discern those customers whose behaviour is most likely to change as a result of marketing, increases campaign profitability by enabling marketers to target fewer people, ignoring those who are not affected by marketing. Greater results are achieved by eliminating negative effects by not targeting those who are prompted by the marketing campaign to look for competitive offerings. As a result, marketers can actually spend less and make more using Uplift, overcoming the marketing modelling myopia that is associated with traditional analytic approaches.

Uplift reduces customer “ad fatigue” Contact or “ad fatigue” is a monumental problem that continues to alienate customers and waste marketing dollars. Not surprisingly, retention programs that pile on top of uncoordinated or frequent messaging have been shown to actually trigger churn – the very action they sought to prevent. Uplift’s ability to identify and exclude those customers that should not be contacted or “disturbed” reduces contact fatigue and improves marketing spending.

According to Forrester, “marketers must consider their overall contact strategy when including customers in retention programs...Retention programs that pile on top of uncoordinated or frequent messaging have been shown to actually trigger churn.” Uplift’s ability to identify and exclude those customers that should not be contacted or “disturbed” reduces contact fatigue and improves marketing spending.
Case study: Telenor To demonstrate the power of Portrait Software’s Uplift modeling automation solution, Telenor, the seventh largest mobile operator in the world, entered into a pilot using identified critical customer response segments.

According to the Forrester report, “Telenor found that by only targeting persuadables, it was able to reduce overall churn by 1.8%. A more telling statistic: These improvements were driven by only targeting 60% of the potential churners. “The benefits of targeting smaller groups is clear cost savings achieved from fewer contacts by telemarketing and lowering of customer fatigue through selective contacts,” wrote Vittal. This 1.8% difference represented a 36% improvement upon the results which were previously achieved using traditional analytics. The case study in the Forrester report also states that “the combination of increased retention rates and lower cost means Telenor will realize an 11-fold increase in uplift campaign ROI when compared with existing programs.” “In a stressed economy, companies must protect, retain and grow customer bases, while spending less money - a concept that seems like an impossibility to most. Uplift is having a profound impact on the way marketers develop campaigns and on the budgets of marketing organisations,” said Smith, “As this report illustrates, word is getting out on the street about the undeniable benefits and possibilities this next generation of segmentation modelling is delivering to the industry.”

To download the Forrester report, go to http://www.portraitsoftware.com/opti...tion_programs2.
For more information on Portrait’s uplift modelling solution, visit http://www.portraitsoftware.com/Prod...lift_optimizer.
About Portrait Software Portrait Software enables B2C companies to drive sales, reduce customer attrition and optimize marketing spend with a next-generation marketing suite. Our integrated solutions empower marketers to automate engagement with targeted individuals and, strategically map delivery of the right message, at the right time, across all marketing and service channels. The Portrait suite seamlessly integrates leading-edge, easy-to-use analytics that enable powerful, event-driven--and highly personalized customer campaigns. Customer-focused organizations benefit from being able to conduct two-way, intelligent dialogs with individual customers, and to build stronger, more profitable customer relationships while maximizing ROI from customer-focused programs.

Our 300 + customers include industry-leading organizations in customer-intensive sectors. They include Merrill Lynch, US Bank, Lloyds TSB, Nationwide, T-Mobile, Telenor, Ziff Davis, Fingerhut, Bank of Ireland, Bank of Tokyo and Fiserv CBS Worldwide.

For more information on Portrait Software, please visit: www.portraitsoftware.com

© 2008 Portrait Software. Portrait Software is a trademark of Portrait Software plc and its group of companies. All other names are trademarks of their respective owners.

[Steve Bennett]

Here is the white paper mentioned in the last post.

[admin]

eServGlobal Limited (ASX:ESV) Launch of Revolutionary Social Networking Software

Sydney, Feb 9, 2009 (ABN Newswire) - eServGlobal Limited (LSE:ESG)(ASX:ESV), a worldwide supplier of independent and flexible telecommunications Value Added Services for Messaging and Charging solutions, today announces the launch of its revolutionary Social Relationship Manager (SRM) software that joins mobile telephone networks with popular internet social networking sites.

The new SRM software allows telco operators to launch a new kind of value added mobile service, one which provides incentives to their subscribers, who in return choose to share their personal profile information. Thus, the operator acquires a new type of business intelligence and uses its customers' social influence to retain the most valuable subscribers. Further, the operator enjoys reduced churn and has the opportunity to acquire its subscribers' friends through the application of suitable referral rewards - all managed inside the application. The service is compatible with most of the popular social networking sites.

Since the advent of 3G, the operator community has struggled to find the "killer application" for always-on devices. However, with more than 650 million subscribers to the top 10 social networking sites, end-users can now enjoy the benefit of mobile data services, by constantly checking or updating lightweight content, which perfectly suits both the mobile device and access networks.

Operators have recognised this trend and have reacted by offering cheap data bundles or customised handsets for social networking but, until now, have found no way to move up the value chain, by either offering dedicated content or compelling applications around the Social Networking domain. The eServGlobal SRM allows operators to participate in the social networking phenomenon, while maintaining their role as the underlying platform for communications.

Designed to be effective in markets approaching all-you-can-eat subscriptions or ultra-low cost per minute, this new service will help operators keep ARPU high by stimulating the user base to communicate frequently inside the operator domain.

Ian Buddery, Executive Chairman of eServGlobal, said: "The coming year is sure to be challenging for operators. They will have to balance the need to stimulate existing subscribers and increase market share, while at the same time reduce the "cost to serve" of Value Added Services. By offering the SRM as an adjunct module to an existing system, eServGlobal is able to provide a compelling business case for telecom operators who wish to attract new subscribers and increase revenue."

eServGlobal has worldwide patents pending for the SRM application, the business intelligence algorithms and the unique deployment options which are available.

eServGlobal will demonstrate the Social Relationship Manager at a launch attended by telecom operators from across the globe at the GSMA Mobile World Congress in Barcelona from 16 to 19 February. Visit Stand 8A69 in Hall 8.

Link: http://www.abnnewswire.net/media/en/...ESV-538934.pdf


About ESERVGLOBAL LIMITED

eServGlobal (LSE: ESG & ASX: ESV) invents smart communication and payment services for telecommunications service providers operating on all generation networks.

As payment is crucial, eServGlobal's Charging Suite responds to increasingly sophisticated charging and billing challenges while providing advanced recharge and m-payment solutions. The innovative Retention Suite delivers targeted incentives to increase customer satisfaction and retention. Meeting customer demand for new communication experiences, the eServGlobal Messaging Suite enables reliable delivery of multimedia services such as unified messaging, video blog, SMS, and instant messaging. The Network Suite supplies enhanced personalisation and network optimisation.

Over 80 of the world's leading service providers, with over 500 million mobile subscribers in more than 50 countries, are taking advantage of eServGlobal's end-to-end solutions and expertise to quickly deliver revenue-generating services. With 15 offices around the world and 750 staff from 20 different countries, we provide flexible solutions with ongoing product development, based on a deep understanding of our customers’ challenges.

eServGlobal is listed on the Australian Stock Exchange (ASX: ESV) and the London Stock Exchange AIM market (LSE: ESG). More information can be found at: www.eservglobal.com

Contact

Ian Buddery
Executive Chairman
eServGlobal Limited

Numis Securities Limited
Brent Nabbs (NOMAD) / David Poutney (Broking)
Tel: +44 (0) 20 7260 1000

ICIS (financial PR)
Christian Taylor-Wilkinson / Bob Huxford
Tel: +44 (0) 20 7651 8688

eServGlobal Limited
Sally Bennett, Communications Manager
sally.bennett@eservglobal.com
T: +33 1 46 12 77 46

[admin]

The courts have just declared that Telstra data mined confidential traffic data about Optus. Check out the post here.

[fgeorge]

By Ry Crozier
itnews, Aug 21, 2009 12:01 AM

Candid experiences from both sides of the fence.

Two case studies presented at the IBM Cognos Forum highlight the compromise required between business and IT when building new solutions.

Representatives from telco Optus and property giant Goodman explained the horse trading that went on to enable them to meet the needs of their shareholders.

The change management delivery manager for Optus' consumer marketing team, Kerry Williams, and Goodman's head of applications, Ritesh Deshpande, revealed how they forged connections across their businesses.

Optus' presentation discussed how a lack of a shared vision for what business and IT were trying to achieve often stalled projects before they began.

For instance, Optus has a business intelligence environment consisting of a Teradata data warehouse, IBM Cognos 8.2 business intelligence and reporting software and statistical package for the social sciences or SPSS Clementine analytics software.

"Although the infrastructure was there it wasn't something the consumer marketing team had exploited," Williams says.

The team had access to about 30 Terabytes of customer data, including call, customer service and network records. This was used to create and measure consumer marketing campaigns, such as for the iPhone 3G S.

But it took a team of 20 analysts to pull down the data, export it to Excel and then PowerPoint packs to report it.

Williams says they had "more work requests than they could ever fulfill" leading to long lead times on reports despite shrinking consumer-marketing cycles.

"When the iPhone launched, we had to turn around the campaign in a matter of weeks. The only constant we have is change and information is the lifeblood of the consumer marketing business. We wanted to do what we could to nurture [its availability]".

Given Cognos business intelligence and reporting software was bedded down in other parts of Optus, it seemed on the surface logical to find a way to exploit that existing infrastructure.

"[But] IT was a little hesitant to do another decentralised BI [business intelligence] project," Williams says.

"Their preference was for a strategic BI solution led by IT and embedded at the enterprise level. They weren't keen on the idea of setting up BI [just] for consumer marketing and literally pleaded with us not to go against their strategic BI roadmap."

Believing the consumer marketers couldn't wait for the rest of the business to catch up, Williams and her division "pushed and pushed".

"It took weeks of presentations, meetings and discussions with IT but in the end we came to a position where they were and are largely supportive of our approach," Williams says.

"We came up with agreements with IT to settle their nerves".

These included reports branded from consumer marketing - quashing confusion over their origins - and an agreement that consumer marketing's customer knowledge team would be the first port of call for any support issues.

"Any intellectual property we developed would be handed over to IT for their strategic BI project," Williams says. "In return, they supported us."

Williams says she will have to keep going back to IT: "We're going to need to keep nurturing the relationship to keep them on board with what we're doing".

This was necessary because the project's early success "kicked up a huge amount of demand" for more reports, says Steve Jackson, principal consultant for implementation partner, Focus.

Read on to see how Goodman handed-off IT application development to users.

Goodman's IT team has adopted a completely different strategy to IT-business alignment.

Goodman is a property group with investments in around 300 business parks, industrial estates and warehouse and distribution centres, counting Woolworths, Brambles, Linfox, Toll and Unilever among its customers.

A small IT team - just 10 people - support over 100 applications, including multiple general ledgers and IBM Cognos TM1 for business analytics.

"The application portfolio is huge," Goodman's head of applications Ritesh Deshpande said. "Mind you, we even class Adobe Reader as an application."

Many applications were inherited through global acquisitions. The company has four general ledger applications - Yardi, Oracle Process Manufacturing, MRI and Coda, depending on where in the world users are.

It runs IBM Cognos TM1 over top of all four to extract information out for central reports.

But given the small size of the IT team, Goodman has placed trust and responsibility for developing reports in the hands of the business.

This was in part possible because TM1 has close ties to Excel. It was designed so Excel users could apply their skills to develop reports in the TM1 system.

"It seems a bit weird because [the finance team are] suddenly writing essentially IT applications," said Luka Montin, a business analyst at Goodman.

"But our model was to get the business to do as much work as possible and for IT to work in a support role."

Goodman's model essentially empowered the finance team as a self-service group. Users are given tiered secure access to the system. For example, data consumers are able to create reports only for their own use, whereas ‘super users' get access "to a bit more data", can create publicly-facing reports and manage change requests.

"End users consult their super users before having to take it to the next level and consult IT resources which are scarce," Montin said.

Montin stressed IT was not cut out of the report provisioning process entirely.

"Obviously there's still some consultation with the IT department to make sure data isn't being duplicated and that there's appropriate infrastructure to support new applications," Montin said.

"But it has heavily reduced the amount of handholding we need to run with finance users.

"The business is happy because they literally created the system themselves. They own the product. It also means they can't come back to the IT team and blame [us if something goes wrong]."

"The model we follow is essentially not to build an IT empire," Deshpande said.

"Business users are in charge of most changes. We just keep some of the very technical things like extract, transform and load (ETL). We outsource most of the actual work [to partner Cubewise]."

Cubewise was also understood to have recommended tools to help IT transition business user-developed applications from development to test to production server environments, streamlining back office elements of the model.

Deshpande believed negotiation between IT and the business was the key to project success.

"It's my primary function to negotiate with internal business people and make sure they're aligned with the business applications strategy," he said.

That strategy was defined and driven by the business, he said. "It's a matter of the business putting some structure and governance around it," he said.

[admin2]

Increase in scope and added complexity to blame, says CFO Stanhope

Computerworld, Tim Lohman 29 October, 2009 03:53

Telstra’s IT transformation budget is over by $1.5 billion on the original $12 billion forecast when the project commenced in November 2005.

But the company’s chief financial officer, John Stanhope, told Telstra Investor Day attendees the additional expenditure was “deliberate”.

“I want to emphasise it is not an overrun in our spend,” he said. “Back in [financial year] 04/05 there were things that we did not have in scope. It is not a concern, therefore, and we actually delivered $1.3 billion less in spending in other areas of our transformation, meaning that the total overspend in the original budget of $12 billion program is around 2 per cent,” he said. “So, there has been no transformation cost blow out at Telstra, which is often said.”

Stanhope said that there had been considerable change in scope to the transformation project which had seen the inclusion of BigPond and additional programs such as network planning in the operational support systems layer and its Sensis integration.

“We have spent an extra $500 million as we have added many new items to the transformation such as enterprise data warehouse, [integration between] new customer service applications and legacy systems, integrated desktop, and online billing,” he said. “Another 200 million was spent on dealing with additional complexity and we have capitalised $400 million on infrastructure we have previously intended to lease.”

The project had also come with its share of difficulties for the company and its customers, Stanhope acknowledged.

“I’d like to remind you it has been much more difficult than we anticipated and the journey has been painful for many of our customers,” he said. “As you go through these major [transformations] you try to avoid that but we realise that some customers have come on this painful journey with us. We have learnt a lot.”

Specific challenges during the project included aligning products, networks and customers, the need to simplify processes before transforming IT and the need for systems to manage customers and staff through the transition.

“Our key learning is the need to continue strategic investment in core platforms,” he said. “You can’t just stop investment then do big bangs. Big bangs are painful and we don’t want to do that sport of thing again. Also, never underestimate the complexity of IT telecommunications infrastructure.”

Despite the overspend, Telstra had begun to reap benefits from the transformation spend including $307 million of revenue and cost savings this financial year and an anticipated $790 million in 2011 and $1.23 billion in 2012, Stanhope said.

Specific benefits had been gained in Telstra’s customer relationship management (CRM), self service and identity management, sales catalogue, campaign management, credit management, usage processing, and IT cost reduction, he said. Email Computerworld or follow @computerworldau on Twitter.

[Jo Vincent]

ITWire, by Stuart Corner
Tuesday, 08 December 2009

Optus has signed a three year contract with HP Enterprise Services (formerly EDS) for outsourcing of several key applications including customer billing, data warehouse and other core systems.

Optus CIO, Lawrie Turner, said: “By streamlining our applications environment, we expect to achieve significant service level and operational improvements across our IT portfolio, which will result in a better experience overall for our customers. The new agreement represents a significant commitment in our relationship with HP. We selected HP for its operational capability, flexibility, security compliance and experience in managing complex transitions.”

According to HP, teams have commenced planning the move of Optus’ current support from a large number of suppliers to HP. It has not said where services will be delivered from but several countries are likely to be involved. HP said that it would use its 'Best Shore' strategy to "provide services from the right place, at the right time...Standardised tools and processes allow for service delivery to be efficiently and effectively transferred between delivery centres worldwide.

According to David Caspari, managing director, Australia and New Zealand, HP Enterprise Services. “Optus needs an agile applications environment to innovate and meet the changing needs of its customers. Combining HP’s deep telecommunications and applications expertise with global Best Shore delivery capabilities will help Optus to improve application quality and achieve cost savings.”