Case Study on How to Make an Information Strategy Roadmap

A global telecom operator asked us to help them define how they

should compete on information five years from then. It was
described as a target scenario for how their analytical competencies
should be in the future and how to get there. The driver of this
project was the IT department, as IT felt that they had many
capabilities to offer the business side of the organization. The issue
was, however, that the cur-rent dialogue was not existing on the
right governed level to make it happen. In steps the project was
executed as per below:
1. To manage such a large scope process, the obvious first step
was to set up a strong project organization with the CIO and the
CEO as sponsors. Then a few days would go into planning how
to run this project, getting the buy-in from all stakeholders of
the suggested approach. This would include getting a clear
scope for what the deliveries were, as well as designing a
mission for what we were about to achieve, including getting all
project members to agree to this mission statement.
2. The next step was to fully understand the company strategy. As
strategies can be formulated in many ways, it was important for
the project to understand the company’s ambition to create full
alignment.
Also, because strategies are often formulated as a series of
projects that must lift the processes to a next level it is important
to understand why the processes must be lifted to this new level.
Strategies typically only look one to three years ahead, but the
IT capabilities must be thought even further ahead as in the case
of this information roadmap. Finally, this strategic knowledge
was essential for the team during the interviews with the
functional and process leaders, making sure that they were
properly engaged and challenged on the visions.
3. The next task was to focus where we could make a change. In
other words, there are some natural focus areas within
organizations defined by the strategy. These focus points are
typically also where change is going on anyway, making it
easier to implement information driven changes with a
significant impact.
4. For each of the focus areas, stakeholders would be engaged.
This could, for example, be the fixed net division, where the
strategic requested change primarily would be about how to
work better with customer loyalty. Hence the focus would be on
the sales and marketing department, while at the same time this
meant disregarding, for example, cable planning processes
where analytics also could be have been used.
Together with each of these departments, we would identify
their key processes as per strategy and make individual maturity
maps for them. For example, a marketing department could have
five key processes; innovate offers, create value proposition,
execute campaigns, internally optimize the campaign landscape,
and measure the campaign effects as per targets. The maturity
maps would also have information maturity dimension always
based in five levels: not using data, using fragmented data, using
data warehouse information, using analytics, and using real time
functionalities.
When developing these maturity maps per function and its
processes, we would then agree with process owners on where
the functions were at the time and where they should be in the
future, including all the things that must be done over time to get
there. Things that had to be done could include, for example,
improving data quality, providing better front ends, training
users, getting CRM concepts and customer journeys in place,
and the like. Each of these things that needed to be put in place
would be described on one pager called a Business Idea In Brief
(BIIB). It is here important to realize that a BIIB can be process
specific but also more general for many processes (e.g.,
improved data quality, which will affect many business
processes ranging from marketing to sending out bills).
5. The following step would be condensing all these business
ideas in such a way that they are mutually exclusive and fully
cover what must be done. Also, it is necessary to group them
into natural clusters so that the stakeholders who must
prioritize the more than 200 BIIBs could get an overview.
6. The next step would then be the prioritization workshops at
which every BIIB would be presented; stakeholders could
either accept them (possibly adapting them on the fly) or
reject them.
7. The following step would be to put all the BIIBs into
roadmaps as individual projects, looking for synergies
between divisions. For example, if more divisions wanted
real-time marketing functionalities, there could be synergies.
In addition, the sequencing would consider what had to be
done first (e.g., data quality comes before real time analytics,
since imprecise real time analytical models would just mean
 sending irrelevant or imprecise information out into the
market). We, so to speak, have to deliver information
maturity from the bottom and up of the maturity map. Again,
the road maps have to be signed off by a stakeholder before
being sent back to the strategy office for funding procedures.
8. The final step of the exercise was to create a governance
around the analytical road map. Where the governance would
be around quarterly meetings in which IT and the business
side would make reviews in regard to whether IT had
delivered what they should and whether the business side was
actively using the capabilities as per strategy. Finally the
governance would also include a continuous updating of the
information roadmap, making sure that it was not only a one-
off exercise but a continuous journey based on dialogue
between the IT and the business side into the information age.
This approach has, by the way, been used for many public and
private organizations over the years, as well as down to the
information needs of individual departments. For more, go to BA-
support.com, where there are examples of the templates and a more
detailed program description.