A Data Auditing Process Model And Its Application In The Telcos

With complexity and flexibility of the business and operation support system in the telcos increasing, the risk of revenue leakage is growing. So, the telcos have shifted their focus on the revenue assurance.Data auditing is one of the most cost-effective methods to carry out revenue assurance, and it ensures data correctness and data integrity. Data auditing is a process which includes: establishment of the auditing balance equations from the business dataflow, extracting data to execute the equations, analysis on imbalanced data metrics, and corresponding decision made to prevent revenue leakage. However, there are three problems in the usage of data auditing:Firstly, as data auditing is involved in multiple business processes and deals with large amount of business data, there isn't an effective way to establish the auditing balance equations so that it is difficult to validate the auditing balance equations;Secondly, Data auditing is still in the manual stage. There aren't priorities principles for the equations and process models as a guidance to automate data auditing. So, data auditing roles and activities are in mess; Lastly, due to the lack of mechanism of the data auditing automation, the data auditors have to program specific auditing applications again and again according to different data balance equations. Therefore, data auditing becomes so time-consuming and is difficult to be validated.Aim at the three problems mentioned above, the following researches have been done in this paper:Firstly, based on the practice and research of data auditing, the telecom business processes and dataflows involved in data auditing are further specified. Two ways to establish the auditing balance equations are given, which are the horizontal and the vertical methods. And the priorities principle of data auditing are presented;Secondly, based on the workflow process definition meta-model, the data auditing process meta-model are derived. According to relationship of the elements in this model, the data auditing process model are abstracted and formalized. This model does not only provide a theoretical guidance for the manual data auditing process, but also makes the foundation for data auditing automation;Thirdly, based on the data auditing process model, a data auditing system is designed and implemented.The research of telecom data auditing in this paper will be benificial to shift the data auditing from manual to automatic, and increase effectivness and efficiency of telecom revenue assurance.