1. A global telecom operator asked a consulting firm to help define its information strategy roadmap over the next five years.
2. The consulting firm executed a multi-step process to develop the roadmap, beginning with setting up a project organization and understanding the company's strategy.
3. They then identified focus areas within the company where information could drive change, engaged stakeholders, and developed maturity maps for key processes to identify where functions currently were and where they needed to be.
4. Business ideas were then condensed into mutually exclusive clusters and prioritized in workshops to develop individual project roadmaps, which were sequenced and signed off before being funded.
5. Finally, governance was established around quarterly reviews of
1. A global telecom operator asked a consulting firm to help define its information strategy roadmap over the next five years.
2. The consulting firm executed a multi-step process to develop the roadmap, beginning with setting up a project organization and understanding the company's strategy.
3. They then identified focus areas within the company where information could drive change, engaged stakeholders, and developed maturity maps for key processes to identify where functions currently were and where they needed to be.
4. Business ideas were then condensed into mutually exclusive clusters and prioritized in workshops to develop individual project roadmaps, which were sequenced and signed off before being funded.
5. Finally, governance was established around quarterly reviews of
1. A global telecom operator asked a consulting firm to help define its information strategy roadmap over the next five years.
2. The consulting firm executed a multi-step process to develop the roadmap, beginning with setting up a project organization and understanding the company's strategy.
3. They then identified focus areas within the company where information could drive change, engaged stakeholders, and developed maturity maps for key processes to identify where functions currently were and where they needed to be.
4. Business ideas were then condensed into mutually exclusive clusters and prioritized in workshops to develop individual project roadmaps, which were sequenced and signed off before being funded.
5. Finally, governance was established around quarterly reviews of
1. A global telecom operator asked a consulting firm to help define its information strategy roadmap over the next five years.
2. The consulting firm executed a multi-step process to develop the roadmap, beginning with setting up a project organization and understanding the company's strategy.
3. They then identified focus areas within the company where information could drive change, engaged stakeholders, and developed maturity maps for key processes to identify where functions currently were and where they needed to be.
4. Business ideas were then condensed into mutually exclusive clusters and prioritized in workshops to develop individual project roadmaps, which were sequenced and signed off before being funded.
5. Finally, governance was established around quarterly reviews of
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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.
Planning is a useless endeavor because developments in e-business and e-commerce and in the political, economic, and societal environments are moving too quickly nowadays.” Do you agree or disagree with this statement? Why?