This article is an invited article from People's Posts and Telecommunications Newspaper, Communications Enterprise Management Magazine, Issue 3, 2017, with slight modifications.

As providers of basic communications services, telecom operators have carried out transformation and upgrading based on the traditional IDC business with cloud computing as a breakthrough, accelerating the construction of cloud resource pools or data centers. It is also based on the special position of the pipeline, telecom operators are naturally a big data warehouse. However, due to the overall lack of success of telecom operators' efforts in the field of Internet application services, the type of their big data is again different from that of Internet companies. In this case, big data-based precision services, which are already in full swing in the industry, are not so easy for telecom operators. How to better provide users with precision services based on big data, which is still the shortcomings of telecom operators. In fact, there are still some lessons to be remedied in order to do this work well and bring more value to telecom operators. This article tries to do some discussion from this perspective, but also suggests that telecom operators "do not fear the floating clouds overlooking the eyes", in front of the industry's diverse concepts, can calm down to make up for some of the basic homework. Otherwise, and then miss the big data precision services, then you can only do a good job of pipeline. And these basic homework, in the author's view, mainly in the user's poor understanding of the user, for the user, did not do an in-depth analysis.

One, the basic business of user subgroups and operation can not reflect the ability of the intelligent pipeline

In order to be more intuitive, on this point, with the telecom operators at the moment the most hopeful traffic operation of the actual problem to do to illustrate.

According to data from the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology (MIIT), the average monthly household mobile Internet traffic exceeded 1G in 2016, more than doubling from 2015, and the growth in traffic consumption has had a significant effect on the growth of total revenue. However, with the policy level of continuous "speed reduction", as well as fierce price competition between operators, in order to further increase traffic consumption, telecom operators in the individual user traffic stimulation, there is a more and more abnormal situation, it can be said that almost has reached the point of very obvious harassment of users. The most obvious manifestation of this harassment is the endless mass SMS push of traffic discount packages, whether on holidays or in normal times.

There are also many friends who complained that "I'm already a 10G per month subscriber, so why are you still sending me traffic discounts? This is not precision marketing, this is harassment!" Obviously, this kind of persistent and almost harassing mass texting by telecom carriers is a typical definition of what precision marketing is all about - harassing users with precision.

Why is this happening? This is typical in the basic business to the user did not do the basic homework of subgroups. There is no effective data analysis of the user's traffic package and the actual basic situation of traffic consumption, there is no more effective data analysis of the user's behavior of overuse of traffic packages and subscription to additional packages, etc. Therefore, in the case of nearly no cost of SMS resources, there is no distinction between the types of users, and the full volume of all kinds of traffic preferential packages sent to the package text messages. There may be some users who subscribe extra as a result, but it's more of a nuisance, especially if the user has upgraded to a 4G network subscriber and the traffic package in the package is already big enough.

So, in this kind of basic business services, big data service is first of all the user sub-groups, to do the first not to harass the user on a large scale, and only after that is the problem of accurate service.

Second, the Internet application service user information silo serious

Telecommunications operators in the Internet application service, in addition to cooperation with Internet companies, their own through the base and corporatization in the video, music, animation, games and other popular areas have invested a larger amount of resources in the development of users. Compared with the users of Internet companies, the user information of these users is often dispersed among various bases/specialized companies, provincial and municipal companies, and data information centers. The rules for labeling data for user profiling vary. Therefore, the data information of users of Internet application services of telecom operators is actually an island. In this case, the first need to make up the most basic data labels needed for big data services, followed by the optimization of the quantity and quality of data labels.

Taking the account operation work being carried out by China Telecom as an example, China Telecom, after an in-depth study of Internet enterprises such as Tencent's QQ account system, WeChat account system, Netease pass system and microblogging account system, believes that: with the Internet security issues becoming more and more prominent, the account system of telecom carriers based on the cell phone number, due to the real-name system, gateway authentication, SIM card and other multiple means, it has obvious differentiation from the existing account system of the Internet industry. Therefore, although telecom carriers did not achieve a corresponding position in the previous round of competition in the application of the Internet industry, with the arrival of the era of intelligent mobile Internet, telecom carriers still have a broad market prospect to re-create a set of account system based on cell phone numbers. Can be differentiated with the current mainstream account system of the Internet industry ability to form and complementary relationship, especially this year's 3.15 gala face recognition reflected in the authentication login security issues, but also to the telecommunications operators based on a safer and faster password-free authentication login provides a new opportunity, and this way of implementation in the technology is also recognized and welcomed by the current major Internet companies. China Telecom in recent years has been carrying out the capacity building work of the unified account system based on the Tianyi account. Thereby, the original Internet applications of each intensive professional company and the subsequent newly launched Internet applications are all included in this account authentication and login system, and even to unify the basic telecommunication services such as fixed-line, broadband, IPTV, cell phone and other basic telecommunication services with this account system. From the perspective of big data precision services, this is actually making up the basic lessons. China Mobile and China Unicom are also promoting the unification of accounts similar to China Telecom's Tianyi account.

Obviously, if telecom carriers can internally unify the account authentication and login for each business, they will create a new in-account system parallel to the current mainstream accounts such as QQ, WeChat, NetEase Pass, Weibo, and so on. Thus, they can cooperate with mainstream applications in the industry, such as the cooperation between China Telecom and Today's Headlines. In this way, telecom operators can obtain more effective user behavior data of self-owned Internet applications and user behavior data of cooperation with industry enterprises. Thus, they can provide a data base for the precise services of Internet applications.

This is also the key to the transformation of telecom operators from the so-called basic telecom service user operation to the account operation of Internet application services.

Three, the key to backward operation is big data, otherwise it is a different way to do "traffic traffickers"

Can not be embedded in the service capacity of big data, then the flow of telecom operators backward business model innovation, it is just a different way to continue to do "traffic traffickers! This is the author based on years of observation of telecom operators traffic backward business model innovation, on different occasions repeatedly mentioned a point of view.

Under the basic policy of "raising speed and lowering charges", coupled with technological advances and network capacity enhancement, traffic management, whether it is the forward mode or the backward mode, will inevitably continue to be affected by the decline in the unit price of traffic, which means that the future traffic management work will be more difficult, and traffic consumption will continue to grow at a high rate, but the corresponding revenue growth will continue to be higher than before. The traffic consumption will continue to grow at a high rate, but the corresponding revenue growth will be limited, and even in local aspects or individual cities, there will be a situation where the traffic consumption grows while the revenue declines.

In this case, has been carried out more than three years of traffic backward operation of the business, from the point of view of revenue growth are multiplying high speed, but this is still mainly from the expansion of the industry. But this is still mainly from the expansion of the industry. It is not as expected in the original planning of the traffic backward business, that is, through the innovation of the traffic backward business model, to achieve a higher value of the backward model as the Internet industry.

The root cause of the failure to achieve such expectations is that the current backward operation business has not been fully injected into the traffic based on the ability of big data. As a result, the performance is still mainly based on the sale of naked traffic. On the one hand, the user base of the traffic backward business model has not been effectively captured, and on the other hand, the existing users also have the same problem of missing or insufficient basic data labeling of the users as mentioned earlier. This is consistent with the situation of user data dispersal and the formation of silos.

Of course, we can also see that China Telecom's backward traffic management model innovation product - traffic treasure, based on the backward traffic management, injected more elements of Internet big data. Therefore, it can relatively well jump out of the pure traffic play, and bring higher value. This is a good case, but, again, there is still the problem of insufficient labeling of user data.

Four, telecom operators for the use of big data assets need to optimize the organization

The first three, whether it is the basic telecommunications business users, or Internet business users, as well as the flow of backward business model innovation users, the lack of ability to label the data of these users is the result of the ability of telecom operators in the precision of the big data services in a few specific manifestations. Why does it cause such data fragmentation? Personally, I believe that this is closely related to the organization and production methods of telecom operators.

We know that, whether it is the basic business, or innovative business, due to the telecom operator's system is too large, in addition to the group company, base/corporate base and provincial branches, there are also various types of business operations support units or centers, which inevitably caused the operator's big data assets split.

In this case, in the original business basis for centralized sorting, standardization and other work is practically impossible, such as the previously mentioned data labels in each province a variety of. And a new set of rules will either be delayed by various practical difficulties in each unit or lack a strong force to implement them.

So, to summarize, I personally believe that the telecom operators of big data precision services to improve, to bring higher value to the telecom operators to improve, we must first make up for the shortcomings in the user's basic work. And to make up for this homework, the most important thing is to optimize the production and organization of big data assets. China Telecom's attempt to develop a comprehensive platform development and operation center as a more Internet-based professional organization may bring more experience to the operator industry.

Originally published by: Stupid Hand Snake; please indicate the source and original creator of the reprint, otherwise it is unauthorized