January 8, 2025

Case Study – Customer Proprietary Networking Information Data Visibility and Business Intelligence

How Kenway Consulting Helped a Fortune 50 Telecom Provider Enable Data Visibility into Their Customer Election History and Develop Interactive Reports for Internal Investigations and Reconciliation

Client Profile:

  • Industry: Telecommunications
  • Client: Fortune 50 Telecom Provider in the US
  • Solution: Comprehensive Data Compliance Investigation and Business Intelligence Implementation

Background:

In today’s data-driven landscape, data visibility and Business Intelligence (BI) reporting are  crucial for complying with increasingly stringent data privacy regulations. Publicity around security issues is gaining an increased level of attention. Enterprises must prioritize compliance with these mandates to avoid significant financial and reputational repercussions. Penalties for non-compliance can reach millions of dollars, with additional daily fines for ongoing violations. For corporations managing vast amounts of customer and/or employee data, achieving and maintaining compliance can be a complex undertaking. 

The Problem

A client's lack of data visibility into their extensive customer base exposed them to potential fines from the FCC for non-compliance with Customer Personally Identifiable Information (PII) and Consumer Proprietary Network Information (CPNI) regulations. Non-compliance can result in hefty fines reaching upwards of $80 million, jeopardizing the bottom line. Limited visibility into data storage systems and the broader IT landscape hampered the client's ability to ensure compliance and address system issues promptly. Without this enhanced observability, assessing and ensuring compliance was a guessing game or sheer luck.   

The Challenge:

To stay compliant with data privacy regulations and prevent security risks, organizations must respond swiftly and accurately to data privacy requests. Achieving this requires a deep understanding of their data flows and the root causes of any internal failures—whether in systems, technology, or processes. However, gaining this level of insight is a major challenge.

Maintaining an enterprise-level reporting system that ensures data accuracy, tracks breaches, monitors system performance, and resolves issues within mandated timeframes involves the coordination of multiple teams and departments. Database owners were so focused on addressing production-grade problems they didn’t have the capacity to build out reporting dashboards for the business. As a result, the business did not have data to provide visibility into the area of focus. 

The Solution

With pre-existing knowledge of CPNI industry-specific regulations and FCC guidelines, Kenway was well positioned to ensure customer opt-in/opt-out preferences were accurately captured in internal systems, especially in complex data environments where customer preferences across multiple lines of business were being maintained in numerous source systems.

Kenway identified these appropriate backend source systems and engaged the database administrators to accurately ingest data into Power BI. Additionally, Kenway wrote custom scripts to parse through a system fallout mailbox to load that data into the business intelligence tool to reconcile against the backend data sources. The team delivered reliable, real-time reporting to the client team with a dashboard to address their gaps, enabling leadership to promptly identify finable offenses and correct within the mandated timeframes. The team built current and future state system mappings which supported the client’s approach to proactively reduce defects before they occur. 

The Approach:

  1. Define and confirm existing challenges and gaps.
  2. Partner with business stakeholders to document requirements for the desired target state.
  3. Groom requirements and prioritize a backlog of user stories.
  4. Align delivery expectations with stakeholders.
  5. Conduct discovery on the existing technical ecosystem and data sources.
  6. Identify data and system-related defects and coordinate with appropriate teams to address.
  7. Collaborate with database owners to understand key data sources and tables for each reporting use case. Understand and document the underlying logic behind each important field.
  8. Ingest all relevant data sources in Power BI and start modeling in Power BI.
  9. Iteratively build reports, demo, collect feedback, enhance, test, and deploy.
  10. Educate business stakeholders on report usage and walk through specific use cases end to end. Provide supporting technical artifacts.
  11. Deploy MVP reports to production.

The deliverables provided were:

  1. Reliable, Real-time, Interactive Reporting Package
    • Embedded logic to identify which records required immediate attention from the Compliance Team
    • Deployed a product-centric approach to easily expand scope and scale at ease
  2. Comprehensive Data Flow Diagrams
    • Provided root cause visibility by creating detailed current and desired state system and data flow maps which facilitated efficient investigations and prevented potential fallouts before they occurred
  3. Secure Environments
    • Leveraging Cloud Gateways and ODBC drivers for security connectivity
    • Secure daily data refreshes to reflect records that were rectified the day prior
A diagram of a diagram

Description automatically generated

Data flow diagram showcasing the consolidation of legacy sources to provide enhanced data visibility for compliance.

The Result

The Kenway Team delivered a comprehensive suite of over 10 cutting-edge, user-friendly reports with export capabilities, empowering users with actionable insights. Additionally, the Compliance Team was equipped with targeted training and robust technical documentation, enabling them to conduct thorough offline investigations for emerging use cases. This dual approach of powerful reporting tools and data visibility improvements significantly enhanced the client team’s investigative capabilities and operational efficiency. 

The reporting suite significantly reduced the manual effort required for investigations and provided more relevant insights allowing users to spend more time rectifying the system fallouts, instead of identifying them in the first place. The Compliance Team began to streamline troubleshooting by tracing system fallouts to their root cause for swift investigations and rectifications within the time span defined by the FCC. Users are equipped with an understanding of upstream systems allowing them to streamline their work by proactively addressing potential recurring fallouts and work to limit their occurrence. 

The FCC enforces substantial fines for the failure to comply with CPNI rules, including the annual certification requirement, that may subject them to enforcement action, including monetary forfeitures of up to $220,213 for each violation or each day of a continuing violation, up to a maximum of $2,202,123 per incident. These limits apply to instances of failure to meet the FCC’s notification requirements, including any breaches related to Initial Rights Notification (IRN) or similar obligations under CPNI mandates. The proactive approach to compliance has led to the identification and correction of 2,203 unique incidents, conservatively preventing an estimated $485 million in potential future fines.

The delivered solution is inherently scalable across multiple regions, business units, or customer bases as the business looks to expand its scope. The use of daily data refreshes, cloud gateways, and secure ODBC connections ensure ongoing compliance needs are met, and the risk of future violations as regulations or internal processes change is mitigated. Ultimately, the solution is well suited to easily be expanded and adapted to future regulatory changes and expansions.

Conclusion:

Throughout this solution walkthrough, we have explored how to navigate the complexities of data privacy regulations and explained how the lack of data visibility into customer data can pose a significant challenge for compliance. We have delved into the power of Business Intelligence and what it can do for any organization, particularly in terms of enabling internal Compliance Teams with the ability to identify actionable insights. 

After partnering with Kenway, the organization had reliable data visibility for the first time to verify that they were compliant with FCC regulations. They received comprehensive data lineage documentation to streamline troubleshooting, allowing them to trace fallouts presented in the dashboard to their root cause and conduct swift investigations and rectifications. Moreover, the secure environment and daily data refreshes ensured they were always working with the most up-to-date information.

Ready to enhance your data visibility and streamline compliance? Contact us for tailored business intelligence solutions.



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