Managing Infrastructure in Serbia

I want to tell you about another telco that has used geospatial IT to dramatically improve their customer responsiveness and how they did it.  First of all let me give you some operational parameters for Telekom Serbia.  They have about 2.5 million wireline customers and about 3 million mobile customers.  Every day they get about 3 500 customer requests.  This means that every month they have to manage about 200 000 service orders.  These are requests for telephone lines, repairs, and new services.  This is a lot of activity.

A number of years ago Telekom Serbia realized that the world was changing and that they had to change from being a state monopoly to become a competitive telco.  One of the most important aspects of this change was to become more responsive to customers.  Specifically, they could not expect customers to wait months for a new telephone service or a repair.  They had to be able to provision a new telephone service much faster.  This meant using IT to automate the provisioning process.  Telekom Serbia had a special challenge.  Because they has been very decentralized with 15 regions running their own IT systems with different IT technology, their system was not only inefficient, but the different regions could not interoperate.

Radovan Cvetkovic, who is Chief Information Officer at Telekom Serbia, was tasked with solving this problem.  Cvetkovic designed an integrated telecom system, Telecom Information System (TIS), that supports provisioning, engineering design, asset management, billing and accounting, sales, and customer care. Cvetkovic called on Boris Damjanovic, Director of Development at OSA, a Serbian IT consulting firm, to assist with spatially enabling TIS.  A key foundation of TIS is that all data, spatial and tabular, is stored in a centralized database, which represents a single point of truth.  Telekom Serbia chose Oracle because of among other things its field proven scalability and because it supports spatial data types. Cvetkovic wanted to ensure that all data including geospatial is open and accessible across the entire organization.  Damjanovic used Oracle Spatial and a desktop application, Autodesk Map, that integrates CAD and GIS.  The result is that geospatial is integrated seamlessly within TIS. 

Another critical aspect of TIS is scalability.  Over 7 000 Telekom Serbia customers use TIS, and on average 2 000 are onlinc concurrently.

TIS has radically transformed Telekom Serbia.  As Telekom Serbia expands, they are able to perform operationaly much more rapidly.  For example provisioning a new telephone line now takes on average two days instead of forty, and Cvetkovic is optimistic he'll be able to get this down to 5 minutes.  This really is an outstanding example of the power of geospatial IT.