Transforming Telefnica

Increasing competition and technological change is impelling the telco industry toward a new model of analytics. Telefnica has been at the front of this change, driving business transformation to a digital telco. John Belchamber and Arturo Canales tell the story of that transformation and detail the pitfalls and challenges faced by teams looking to follow a similar journey.

Telefónica’s global team has looked to design a data science-based process to use big data analysis to identify economic and key business benefits, which Telefónica could then extend to provide transferable business capabilities (in the form of code or models) to all teams. John Belchamber and Arturo Canales explore Telefónica’s move toward a big data-led approach and detail the pitfalls and challenges faced by teams looking to follow a similar journey. John and Arturo explain how exploiting solutions across the big data environment (Spark, R, Hadoop, D3, etc.) and integrating the outputs into a traditional data-storage environment proved challenging but has delivered superior data enrichment that allows for greater understanding of the customer base. John and Arturo weave their experience delivering a myriad of big data projects into their discussion to demonstrate techniques that can improve the integration of new data sources into existing platforms in a coordinated and effective manner. John and Arturo show that once delivered, this process can support new business strategies across all communication channels through optimizing and customizing content to smaller and smaller customer groups, delivering higher response rates and improved ROI.