Big Insights as a Vehicle of Organizational Transformation

Helping boost revenues, monetize data, and drive innovation using Big Insights Transformation

Background

A leading provider of voice, text, data and money transfers for consumers and businesses across South Asia and Europe with 15 operating units and more than 150 Million Subscribers. Over a period of time, each operating unit as well as the corporate office had gone through multiple iterations of business intelligence and analytics implementations, some successful and some not successful. On the business side, the operating costs were going through the roof thus reducing margins, while at the same time smaller, nimbler entrants were eating into the subscriber base. Many organizational and external forces were blocking the way forward, including decentralized IT teams, multiple large initiatives in flight with no clear accountability and ROIs, some initiatives even taking as long as 3 years to come up with concrete deliverables.

Approach

StratApps, along with a Management Consulting firm specializing in Telecom initiated a 3 month program to understand the landscape and put together a business and technology transformation plan. The objectives were very clear:

1. What is the right and sustainable operating model for the next 5 years, within reasonable limits on Operational and Capital Expenses?
2. How can the marketing team be empowered with information, in right time and at the right granularity to predict the market movers, and plan for the same?
3. What will it take to transform the organization from a reactive decision making culture to a insights driven culture at every step?
4. What new offerings and services can be created to monetize the data?
5. What efficiencies can be realized by consolidating or decentralizing service delivery models?

Working with a broad cross section of Executive Management, Middle Management and Operational Teams across all geographies and business functions, a concrete business case and a working model were proposed.

Results

The overall recommendation included organizational structure, revamped functional processes, areas to rationalize, centralized service delivery model, distributed execution models and more. E.g. In a span of 9 months, the entire data warehouse and reporting infrastructure of all business units were consolidated into a single, scalable Hadoop and advanced analytics environment. This effort alone reduced the Opex and Capex by 80% within the first year! In addition, Marketing teams across all business units were able to analyze data in real time, run predictive models including churns, segmentation, and sentiment analysis in a fraction of the time. This also resulted in the company offering its first data product for third party partners, directly adding to the top and bottom line.

Note: Our agreement with all parties involved in this initiative restricts us from sharing the identity of the client as well as other confidential information.