It is important to know what you are measuring with your Telecommunications spend. In order to manage your Telecommunications, you need to know what you are measuring and also ensure that you are measuring the correct activities.
Lack of visibility of your telecommunications spend is common for companies. Your IT organisation should be measuring the usage of your fixed and mobile telephone calls, and your usage of mobile data and fixed line data. Yes, you do get tools like Telephone management systems (TMS) to measure your phone usage and network management tools that will measure your data usage.
So let’s assume that you are measuring your phone and data usage, but do you know what you are trying to achieve with your metrics?
There are many objectives to managing your telecommunications, some of them being:
- Managing the demands on your data infrastructure capacity
- Identifying what are the most popular web sites visited to mitigate risk, to understand user behaviour, to understand productivity etc.
- Identifying the business versus private usage of your Internet traffic to understand your true cost of business and cost of HR
- Managing the demands on your Voice infrastructure capacity
- Understanding the productivity of your various departments
- Measuring the adherence to the policies you have in place to support the usage patterns your business requires
You now have the correct systems and tools in place and you are measuring your phone and data usage. Do you have a single view of your usage, or are there multiple systems that you need to access? Not having a single view of your voice and data usage adds layers of complexity and risks in your reporting. There is complexity with providing reports that are showing the same information across your voice and data systems.
It is important that your reports are produced to provide information to IT, finance and operations.
- IT needs the reports to manage the capacity, availability and performance;
- Finance needs to pay the service providers in time to avoid penalties, and also to ensure they are paying the service providers for the correct services;
- Operation needs to understand what services they business has, and to determine if the services they are consuming are the correct services.
Finally, are you tracking your actual usage versus your budgets? Depending on the nature the business unit and the activities they perform, this will determine what their telecommunications budget should be. Regular tracking of their actual usage is recommended to provide the business with valuable information about the performance of those business units.
Applying business intelligence to the metrics captured by your management systems will assist finance and operations to steer the business in the right direction.
Telesa has over 17 years of experience in providing organisations with the necessary information to effectively assist your business with the business intelligence your company can use. View our solutions for managing your communications by clicking the button below:
