Kyle Siniard, VP of Technology for 3-GIS, outlines an innovative business process framework for service providers and their engineering vendors that deliver in real-time the network data to activate services faster.
Telecommunications companies need to deploy networks ever faster in order to be competitive because there is a critical need to, not only implement new technology, but to embrace new business practices that exploit the benefits of that technology. Kyle discusses how fundamental it is for Service Providers and their different engineering firms and construction firms to share network data in real time and - more importantly – he stresses how critical it is for service providers to be able to have high fidelity network data for their operations systems. When asked about the main goals of service providers today, he continues to explain that “building that scalable solution that’s flexible, that can share data and that can quickly adjust is vital to being successful today in the telco market as the competition just grows and grows every day.”
Kyle highlights what a new method would look like for a service provider who seeks to adjust its operational strategy: “The first step is always figuring out what your source of record is going to be and moving towards a single source of record.” He further underlines the significance of data uniformity for outside plant management: “creating that single source of record that everyone inside your organization is looking at drives the decision-making process, and it allows you to have some confidence inside the decisions that you’re making. So, once you get this data model, the structure of all your assets… then you can start to build the external systems around that, and you can start to see the fruits of your labor.”
3-GIS has supported Verizon, one of the largest service providers in the US, in a shift towards this new business model of a unified data system. Kyle, therefore, offers a detailed example of what the transition process entails when assisting a large service provider: “I have 70 different, almost, projects going on and being run in a different format. I then have 20 different vendors managing these markets, so, even organizationally, the businesses I’m working with operate slightly differently. Then, I have 5,000 users or more across all those 70 markets, 20 vendors and my internal team,” he also adds that “in an eight-month period, we took all those different markets, different vendors, and all of those users, and we converted that data and moved them into a single system – a unified data model. That data model is maintaining almost 85,000 geospatial files, it’s got 25,000 fiber miles … and then, in terms of the sheer volume of data, it’s over 130 million different records.”
The transition into a single GIS database for larger service providers compared with smaller service providers is very similar, the main difference lies in the speed at which providers of a smaller scale seem to be able to make that change. According to Kyle “smaller companies have the ability to pivot faster than larger providers. The steps for smaller service providers are probably almost identical but the speed at which they can be accomplished is drastically different.”
This latest episode of Fiberside Chat with Kyle Siniard succinctly paints a picture of the real-time revolution, of the main goals of communication service providers, and of a enterprise-wide business model to expedite time to revenue.
Check out the latest episode of the Fiberside Chat with 3-GIS podcast to join the discussion on outside plant management. Listen online here or download the episode from iTunes or Spotify.