Customer case

Optimization of Business Intelligence practices

Wed 07 Nov 2018

Stake

The Direction of Information Systems of this worlwide telecommunications group requested Sofrecom’s expertise to support its subsidiaries in the Africa & Middle-East zone in the adoption and efficient use of Business Intelligence (BI) solutions. This project has 3 objectives:

- to define and share the group’s recommendations for BI
- to define a BI RFP template that covering all of the key KPIs for a telecom operator (fixed, mobile, postpaid, prepaid),
- to support the subsidiaries throughout their RFP process

Methodology

To start with, our consultant assessed the current BI situation thanks to several interviews with the people in charge of each country’s Information System, with the department leads (Sales, marketing, Finance) and with other people related to BI in the group. This assessment uncovered several dysfunctions in the use of BI: rarely used by business departments who do not trust its results et prefer to use their own sources of data, BI does not fulfil its objective. It does not provide the subsidiaries’ management teams with consolidated and reliable reports. Our consultant therefore first wrote a series of recommendations to turn BI into a valuable source of trustworthy information for the business.

Following this first phase, our consultant, wrote a standard statement of BI requirements to meet the needs of the different departments and covering all the necessary KPIs.

Our consultant also implemented a specific BI governance and a single point of entry for BI queries within the group. By combining it with best practices sharing among the subsidiaries, this process enabled all the subsidiaries, the novice ones as well as the more expert, to speed up problem resolution.

Subsequently, our consultant kept on tracking the different BI projects across the MEA zone to continuously refine the recommendations. He also provided technical support to ensure smooth implementations.

Results

The operator’s MEA subsidiaries now have at their disposal a homogeneous RFP template meeting both technical and business BI needs. They have also a set of practical recommendations aligned with their respective maturity and their information system ecosystem. Our consultant was instrumental in the consolidation of BI best practices to spread the expertise faster.