The challenge
A large Telco organisation was grappling with the challenge of maintaining a balance between delivering committed book of work and responding to adhoc data requests from business to explore ‘ideas’. Even though the organisation was largely traditional BI centric, a sudden excitement to do a lot on Big Data without any defined outcome or benefit was creating competing priorities for the IT team significantly deteriorated the dynamics between these two teams.
The Solution
We stepped in at a critical juncture to help the organisation build a bridge between two sides and bring a rational approach to prioritisation of the delivery backlog and at the same time keep the excitement alive to do more with Data.
An iterative insights discovery focussed around Business Outcomes helped to create a prioritized backlog of delivery initiatives that the organisation should focus on. The agile insights discovery also highlighted significant areas of real opportunities for business to focus on rather than chasing unproven ideas. A highly collaborative rapid prototyping phase of some of the concepts business had helped to breakdown some of the silos and gaps that existed around understanding of the data flows, complexity of the processes and challenges involved with delivery.
The Result
There is a lot of hype around Big Data which is creating lot of excitement among the teams and taking their focus away from where they should be focussing. Also, lot of the ideas do not have a definitive business value attached to it, as a result any exploration of these idea are not only time consuming but also result is uncertain.
By validating these ideas in terms of actual opportunities and then feeding them into a prioritized backlog which is focussed around business outcome and then helping the organisations to deliver these rapidly enabled incremental value in a controlled manner rather than chasing a big target and wasting massive amount of money at the early stage. This was a classing example of bringing a 30,000 foot vision down to an executable plan and enabling an organisation to leverage the power of Big Data without lot of the early stage wastage.