Professional Assessment of Big Data Infrastructure Readiness in Nigerian Telecommunications Companies

Telecommunications companies in Nigeria generate massive volumes of data daily and face competitive pressure to extract customer insights and operational efficiencies from this data, yet the readiness of their big data infrastructure to support advanced analytics remains understudied. This study professionally assessed big data infrastructure readiness at three major Nigerian telecommunications operators. A structured readiness assessment tool based on the Gartner Analytics Maturity Model was applied through structured interviews with 12 data engineering directors and 9 analytics leads, technology stack documentation reviews, and cloud adoption audits. Assessment covered data lake architecture, stream processing capabilities, data cataloguing, governance controls, self-service analytics enablement, and ML platform maturity. Results showed that all three operators had implemented Hadoop-based data lake foundations. Real-time stream processing was operational in one operator, partially deployed in one, and absent in one. Data cataloguing tools were deployed in one operator. Self-service business intelligence was widely available but ML platform infrastructure was nascent in all three. Data governance was rated adequate in only one operator. Cross-departmental data access was restricted in two of three operators, limiting analytics value realisation. The study provides a comparative benchmark and identifies infrastructure investment priorities. Recommendations include a phased investment roadmap from descriptive to predictive analytics, cloud migration of batch processing workloads, and establishment of a central data governance committee with business unit co-representation at each operator.

Keywords: big data infrastructure, telecommunications, Nigeria, analytics maturity, data engineering