Case USA5: Why a Telecom Operator Mistook Data Lake Expansion for Enterprise Architecture Progress

Overview:

In the telecom sector cases within our 100 US diagnostics, we see data infrastructure projects dressed up as EA milestones.

Operators have built massive data lakes, ingesting terabytes from network devices, customer interactions, and billing systems. Annual reports frame these as architectural leaps. Yet without structure, governance, and shared semantics, the lakes became isolated silos — unable to support enterprise-wide decision-making.

P1–P6 Insight Preview: 

The lakes improved component storage capacity (P4) and operational visibility (P6) in isolated contexts, but lacked system-wide behavior modeling (P3) and strategy alignment (P1), making cross-domain insights unreliable.

Role Disconnects:

1. CEO: “We own one of the largest telecom data repositories” — yet strategic insight hasn’t improved.

2. CIO: “Our data is centralized” — but semantic governance is missing.

3. Sales Head: “We can target offers more precisely” — yet targeting fails when definitions shift across systems.

4. Chief Enterprise Architect: “We have storage, not architecture” — no structured flow of enterprise data.

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