Telekom Innovation Laboratories is an experimental scientific institute that produces game changing innovations in the field of web-based communication, big data and user driven innovation.
Dr Susan Wegner heads up innovation and smart data analytics & communications in this laboratory, which sees petabytes of user data investigated to drive future telecommunication business. Susan studied Computer Science and Mathematics at the Technical University of Berlin and at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Times this by her 10 years’ experience in designing and managing innovation development within the Deutsche Telekom Group and you have an incredible individual we are excited to meet at TDA conference this October.
We sat down with Susan to get a glimpse into the heart of her role at Deutsche Telekom and where the company is moving over the next few years.
How is Deutsche Telekom approaching data analytics in 2017?
With the establishment of the new central data office at Deutsche Telekom, we will have new challenges for this and the next years. We will focus first on internal alignment and solutions to gain more efficient insights out of core telco data across the different units in Deutsche Telekom Group. Other topics would be to drive new data centric use cases for the group and to define a common data management service.
How will network operations improve with the introduction of a new data culture at Deutsche Telekom?
Data centricity will lead to new solutions and new opportunities to optimise the infrastructure regarding performance. Faster analytics and new approaches are mandatory and need to be extended and streamlined. Aspects like near real-time analytics will affect this topic also and needs to be covered by a telco operator.
You will be discussing Big Data opportunities that derive from the core network at our show. Could you give us a snippet of what you will share with our audience?
Here an internal alignment and new analytic, but also cultural approaches, needs to be established. There is a need for clear roles and from a technology point of view overarching harmonised management architecture. More insights will be presented at the show.
It is often said that the telecommunications industry lags behind other industry verticals in the adoption of data analytics infrastructure – how true is this perception?
It depends on the referring industry or company. In relation to e.g. Google, a data centric company, it’s obvious. But in my opinion, we are well-positioned compared to other large companies, out of the automotive area or finance & banking. We are far ahead in customer service which is based on intelligent data analytics for example.
How do you foresee the role of analytics changing with the introduction of 5G?
A new standard with higher bandwidth and consequently higher data rates will make data analytics more relevant than ever but will also bring further new challenges to our business. The increase of data and also latency leads to new requirements also for the analytics and the near real-time data availability.
As one of the keynote speakers at this year’s Telco Data Analytics Europe event, what excites you most about attending this show?
I’d like to share our view and approaches with other but also learn from each other is one main objective and a reason for joining that great event. A good connection across company borders and to shape the future together should be the target and the interaction, as well as the different perspectives, will lead to new ideas and result in new solutions.
Catch Dr Susan Wegner at Telco Data Analytics (TDA) Europe who will be delivering her keynote: Addressing Network Obstacles with Smart Data Analytics. https://tmt.knect365.com/telco-data-analytics-europe
IN ASSOCIATION WITH TELCO DATA ANALYTICS
