Data warehousing is fast becoming the buzz word in marketing nowadays. But, when should a company embark upon a data warehousing project? The company size alone may not be the sole determinant for initiating this action. Company size can only be one amongst several other important factors that determine the need for a data warehouse.

The other ancillary queries that have to be addressed first are –

(1)    Are executives asking questions pertaining to customer profiling in a particular region, the reasons for dip/rise in sales in specific geographic locations, impacts of allocations of advertizing budgets per locale, prediction of buying patterns and identification of hidden trends in the business directions?

(2)    Is there a need to reconcile a company’s different data sources and enhance the in-house intelligence capabilities so that executives are empowered to make appropriate business decisions?

(3)    Is the market that the company belongs to characterized by rapidly changing parameters and is it currently difficult to refocus corporate strategy because of the dynamic environment?

(4)    Do executives from different corporate functional departments feel the need for integrating decision making processes across the organization so that only those decisions that truly add value are pursued? Now the tacit assumption is that the company has already had a chance to define its KPIs.

If the answer to all the above questions is yes, the need for a data warehouse has come, irrespective of how big the company is.

In my class this weekend at Stanford University – Advanced Project Management program, the topic of discussion was – The Managerial Challenges of Innovation Strategies. The speaker divided types of innovation in two main categories

1. Innovation Strategies in Growth Markets e.g., Skype, Sony PS platform
2. Innovation Strategies in Mature Markets e.g. P&G, Disney

The assignment was to position your company in one of these markets and then determine the type of Innovation strategies that are or should be employed by your company. Since Perficient, being a consulting firm does not fit the paradigm required here, I decided to extend my analysis to the Telecommunication Service providers at large. Perficient has served a bunch of  Telecom Market leaders and start-up firms in the past and we have noticed that the challenges they face are uniquely different from those of other industries. They face the dreaded sluggishness of legacy systems, that need to be fixed time and again and need a big portion of the budget and resources to devote their time on such projects. But these companies cannot stay behind , they don’t have time to cut slack, they NEED to innovate rapidly to fight competition.

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People want connectivity everywhere. They want to use mobile data applications in almost every setting possible (on the bus, plane, ski slopes, rural countryside, etc). With the exponential growth that customers experience in today’s mature communications market, they expect wireless coverage to be completely ubiquitous, to exist everywhere, and without interruption.

Advertisement slogans like “More Bars in More Places”, the “Now Network” and the induced fear of “Dead Zones” contribute towards strengthening this expectation. But customers are only one element in a wireless communications service provision system. Careful study of this system can lead us to being able to represent the entire system with a single diagram that we will call “the wireless PIT” (Policy Interaction Triangle). Understanding the elements of the PIT and abstracting the interactions between these elements can assist in the design of a formalism that can be extended to the study of other telecommunications systems as well. Like in most other systems, a company that is able to position itself to deal with these interactions between elements is capable of developing a niche area of expertise in the market.

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