Business Analysis Expertise Required for Telecom Domain

Business Analysis Expertise Required for Telecom Domain

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Telecom industry has been pacing up very rapidly with the technology advancement that has been happening. It has been a spectacular journey for telecom industry starting from invention of telephone to the recent 5G deployment. Apart from core voice services, telecom industry has shaped up various other services for B2C as well as B2B segment.

With the technological advancement never been so rapid before, is affecting all the industries and telecom industry is no exception. In the world moving towards digital economy, it has been a rapid growth of customers using mobile services (almost 7.33 billion users worldwide). With this technology innovation and such huge market space, there are various new players coming up to take a slice of this huge revenue cake and the industry is getting competitive to a next level.

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In such a competitive market space, whole of the telecom industry ecosystem including operators, supplier, partners and vendors has to remain at edge with innovation happening around. Every technology innovation has a probable impact on the telecom industry as well. Hence there is a need of people who understand its impact and can contribute to developing various use cases.

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Role of Business Analyst

Business analysis is an art to elicit the growing customer requirements and identify hidden or other impacting requirements as well in the as is state, to understand target state customer is trying to achieve and to understand the gap between the current state and target state. Hence, it helps identifying the changes required in the overall landscape. Business analyst acts as a bridge to understand the business requirements from customer and translating it to technical requirements in terms of business process changes, system changes, and feature development etc. to the internal team.

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Business Analysis Expertise: Telecom domain

Business analysis requires a strong understanding of domain because systems and processes are closely associated with the domain. Below points are the fundamentals required for a business analyst for a telecom domain:

1.?????? Business Process & Use Case:

Since business analyst works as a bridge between customers and technical teams, it is important for them to understand the overall business process and a use case, a particular operator has in place. With an overall good understanding about the business process and business scenario, it gets easier for business analyst to identify the area of improvements to adopt recent technologies and to contribute to enhance the efficiencies.

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2.?????? Systems

Business Analyst shall have utmost clarity and functioning of systems being worked upon. Functioning of system covers both the functional as well as the overall technical part. This will help them to understand how a particular system is used to achieve a specific use case and how it contributes to overall business process.

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3.?????? Best Practices and Standards

All telecom operators in the era of increased competitiveness are moving towards standardized adoption and strong adherence to best practices suggested to reduce the launch time in the market and to increase the efficiency of solution. TMForum (TeleManagement Forum) is a global organization involved in researching and defining telecom standards and best practices from the industry experts itself. Many such best practices such as eTOM (for business process), SID (for data modelling), TAM (for application functioning), Open APIs (for integration) and 3GPP standards (for cellular networks) are defined and widely accepted. Business analyst must have a thorough understanding of these best practices and standards so that an operator and business analyst communicates over a common language.

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4.?????? Integration

With the understanding of business, systems and best practices for a telecom industry, a business analyst develops a holistic view of responsibilities of each system and how different system communicates and data flows in the overall telecom operator’s landscape. It also develop a sense in which component a particular feature/enhancement has to be developed and how it will be propagated to required systems.

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5.?????? Technology

The last, the foremost, understanding a technology has been inevitable in any industry whether it be CxOs or a developer developing the systems. Technology underneath the application or overall landscape is taking a huge advancement such as various data processing platforms are developed such as Apache Kafka, Kibana etc., Artificial Intelligence models integrated with various tools to develop use cases such as AIOps and the recent development of GenAI technology is making all sounds in the market. Telecom operators and vendors have started experimenting with this recent technology to develop some unique use cases.

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As we now know, understanding of all of the above components is required by a business analyst to contribute to the overall telecom business area.