Data quality for telecommunications

The importance of data in large databases to the operation of telecommunications networks has grown considerably. For example, all provisioning, maintenance, and billing operations are critically dependent on data and many new network services are based on real-time access to data. This makes data quality a major issue for the industry. The purpose of the present paper is to outline an approach for addressing at least part of this issue. This approach makes use of process management to focus attention on processes that create data and data tracking, one method to quantify the performance of such processes. The merits of this approach are compared to more traditional methods of “cleaning” databases. A joint AT&T/LEC process, by which special services access is ordered and provisioned, is used as an example