Knowledge Management

While the areas of data warehousing and data mining for telecommunications are certainly complex and abstract they are by no means difficult to define. Not true when it comes to the issues of Telecommunications Knowledge Management. Knowledge Management for Telecommunications, like knowledge management for all industries is a relatively new term, used to describe a number of loosely related approaches and tools.

Knowledge management is the name of a concept in which an enterprise consciously and comprehensively gathers, organizes, shares, and analyzes its knowledge in terms of resources, documents, and people skills. In early 1998, it was believed that few enterprises actually had a comprehensive knowledge management practice (by any name) in operation. Advances in technology and the way we access and share information have changed that; many enterprises now have some kind of knowledge management framework in place. From this theoretical perspective we would actually consider telco business intelligence, telco data warehousing and telco data mining to be subsets of the broader telco knowledge management definition.

However, in practical, day to day operational terms, we use the term Telecommunications Knowledge Management to identify all of those solutions that have to do with the storage, management, retrieval and analysis of non-data based information. In other words, Knowledge Management is the term we use to define Data Warehousing and Data Mining for non-data objects.

Major processes involved in Telco Knowledge Management

While the high level approach and objectives of Telco Knowledge Management are similar to those of Telecommunications Data Warehousing and Data Mining, the details of how it is carried out, the things that it manages and the business problems that it is used to solve can be very different.

In an Information Week article, Jeff Angus and Jeetu Patel described the four major functions of knowledge management, and the processes involved in accomplishing them. These functions include Gathering of Information, Organizing it into a usable form, Refining what is being stored to make it more accessible and useful and Disseminating it.

Telco Knowledge Management Products

By far the single most popular and highly utilized Telco Knowledge Management "product" is the Telecommunications Companies Website. Both the internet and intranet provide most Telco's with a huge backlog of opportunities to gather, organize, refine and disseminate the information critical to telecommunications company executives, employees, business partners, stakeholders and customers at an exceedingly low cost.

In addition to this "build your own" capability, a number of packaged "telco knowledge management" solutions are also available. These include "knowledge engines", "knowledge portals", "text mining" and a variety of other interesting areas.

Telecommunications Knowledge Management Solution Areas

Given the obvious availability of tools and "raw material" it should come as no surprise to find that Telecommunications Companies are developing Telco Knowledge Management Solutions at a hectic pace. Some of the more prominent and obviously useful solutions include:

• On line customer care systems

• On line, real time provisioning, activation and account reconfiguration

• On line product/service catalogs

• On line product manuals

• Real time cafeteria menus

• Call Center Trouble Tracking Knowledge Base

• Network Diagnosis Knowledge Base

• Real time trouble ticket tracking and resolution

TTA and Deliver Telco Knowledge Management Expertise

As with all of the other areas of Telco Business Intelligence, has had years of experience helping telecommunications firms to conceptualize, design and deliver Telecommunications Knowledge Management solutions that deliver high value for a low cost. As the principle designer and architect for a number of web portals, and as the author of the extremely popular book "Web Warehousing and Knowledge Management" - McGraw-Hill, has been in the forefront of research and practice in the Telecommunications Knowledge Management area.