The Role of Big Data Analytics on Innovation: A Study from The Telecom Industry

Telecom companies face a fierce competition from innovation based start-up companies, particularly those that are using internet networks to offer communication services through the voice and video over internet protocol (VoIP & PVoIP) technologies. More than 10 years have passed from the time the internet and VoIP were widely used, but still, telecom companies are having a great deal of business success through offering a wide spectrum of services, products, deals, and packages to consumers using both B2C and B2B models. The future landscape of how telecom companies will evolve in the market is still not clear, particularly with the increase of aggressive competition from companies that are technology-innovative and starting to deliver new forms of ubiquitous communication technology and services. Understanding why and how telecom companies innovate in the market is very crucial in order to predict the future of this business sector. In this paper, we argue that telecom companies are utilising their capabilities that have a significantly important role in fostering innovation, namely information technology (IT) capability and knowledge management (KM) capability. IT capabilities have changed dramatically in the last few years with the introduction of intelligent systems, big data analytics, the Internet of Things and the wide use of mobile apps and sensors. It is not clear how these technologies play a role in telecom companies’ innovation and it is not clear whether IT impacts innovation directly or if KM capability has a mediation role in utilising technology to support innovation. This paper is a position paper to establish grounds for understanding how telecom companies innovate, and in particular how IT and KM capabilities influence innovation. We outline the methodology of this investigation as a qualitative study with stakeholders from multiple telecom companies and we expect at the end of the study to be able to offer a holistic view on the way these companies innovate in regard to their products and services. We aim at providing a cross case studies comparison towards a prediction of the future of the telecom business sector

The Role of IT and Knowledge Management Capabilities in Generating Innovation Knowledge in Telecom Companies

Most organisations moving their legacy systems to the cloud base their decisions on the naïve assumption that public cloud always provides cost savings, without sufficiently assessing the underlying application architecture, and the technical and financial constraints that it imposes on the chosen cloud architecture. This can lead to undesirable consequences including project delays, budget overruns, below-par performance, application instability and creation of technical debt. In this paper, we address the shortcomings of this assumption by proposing a structured yet flexible decision framework comprising models, guidelines, tools and calculators that enables IT and/or business practitioners to make the correct architectural decision between public, private and hybrid cloud, from a functional, non-functional and financial perspective, based on the application architecture. By treating the application architecture as a first-class citizen in the decision making process, our proposed framework ensures that business and technical stakeholders make the correct decision early on in the migration process, resulting in timely deployment and quality-assured provision of critical business functions, minimization of waste, and avoidance of rework. We use a sample scenario to illustrate the need and usefulness of such a decision framework

The Role of Big Data Analytics in Innovation: A Study from The Telecom Industry

Organisations are looking for new definitions and guidelines for innovation direction due to the changing nature of technology, user behaviour, competition and market trends. Data sources, types and analysis mechanisms have changed dramatically in the last few years, and there are pieces of evidence that these are influencing the level of innovation in a firm. We found that it is very important to explore how telecom companies capture, analyse and make innovation insights from big data. Our review shows a clear scarcity of research on this topic. The study aims to use qualitative methods of both interviews and documents review in three telecom companies in Jordan, with an opportunity to extend the study to different regions and countries. The understanding of how big data and its analysis are carried out by companies will support our effort in building more systematic procedures and guidelines for companies who wish to utilise big data for different types of innovation with different levels of maturity indicators