Customer Success Story
Driving with Data Literacy to Guide Analytics Value Realization
Nurturing a culture of doing more with data, InfoCepts executed on a data literacy program to launch new business benefits and lower IT support costs
Being a large retailer, our customer had a steep dependence on technology and its support teams for even the most basic of queries. With a focus on learning and adoption, InfoCepts helped it to modernize and embed analytics use in its core operations.
The Challenge
The retailer was expanding rapidly; its dependence on IT support for basic analytic queries had become a bottleneck. It sought to centralize support services, and the lack of empowered self-service had led to ballooning IT costs, delays, and disgruntlement among its employees.
Seeking to keep pace with the fast-changing luxury retail world, its business and IT leadership invested in best-of-breed technology to build scale—including Snowflake, Alteryx, and Power BI. But ineffective user training resulted in only a 14% pickup in targeted analytic tool use. Management goals of user empowerment remained a distant dream.
Most staff remained oblivious to the existing enterprise data hub. Finance users couldn’t appropriately allocate investments because of poor HR metrics and data element knowledge. Storefront and customer service reps continued to rely on Excel spreadsheets or IT, losing sales opportunities in the process.
Our customer’s leadership team knew that unlocking sustainable value calls for continuous innovation in how data is consumed to derive actionable insights. This implied having a workforce fully able to identify new buying behaviors and leverage technology to assimilate analytics use cases.
The Solution
With our proven 4S (Strategy, Structure, Skills, Solutions) BI Adoption Framework, InfoCepts ignited our customer’s data literacy program. This approach ensured that its program strategy would continuously synchronize with its data governance structure, its skill improvement plan, and user uptake of new technology solutions. Rollout comprised three phases—Assessment, Learning, and Adoption and Governance.
Assessment – InfoCepts evaluated information management processes and competency levels across seven departments to reveal gaps. This helped us assess the persona of data stewards and champions, as well as the quarterly plan for enhancing skill levels over one year.
Learning – We worked with internal teams on content preparation and training delivery. Our customer chose a combination of train-the-trainer and self-paced training for departments such as merchandising, store operations, travel industry marketing, and CRM. Data literacy participants were spread across North America, Japan, Singapore, Hong Kong, Australia, Italy, Macau, UAE, and a few other sites.
Adoption and Governance – InfoCepts helped promote user adoption of the new toolsets. A gamification strategy stirred user excitement. The data governance council articulated a way to sustain business data changes, with matrices to manage data creation and consumption processes.
As part of the solution, we also introduced a business glossary to help users with data architecture principles. It enables quicker access to KPI definitions and data catalogs. For continuous innovation we helped create a Collective Intelligence portal that enables a Google search for commonly used datasets, reports, and data models.
The Customer
Our customer is a leading luxury travel retailer, selling as well as leasing space to 700+ marquee brands. Operating at airports and gallerias in major tourist attractions in over 28 countries, its stores employ over 9,000 people worldwide—all who create inspiring retail experiences for its customers.
Industry
Retail
Business Functions
Store Operations, Merchandising, Digital, CRM, Finance, FP&A, HR, Travel Industry Marketing
Solution
Data Literacy
Technologies
Snowflake, Power BI, MicroStrategy, Alteryx
Geography
APAC
Year of Deployment
2019
Thanks to the business intelligence team who helped in building, publishing, and training us on the Daily Venice Scorecard using Power BI. It’ll be consumed by senior European executives along with 50+ other senior managers and analysts. The modular reference content lets us look for pinpointed help rather than pouring through hour-long, monolithic training videos of the past.”
The Result
InfoCepts’ data literacy program helped our customer realize a tangible reduction in IT support costs. Data hub users doubled to 1,100, with about 600 very active users. They saw a 4x increment in the self-service data and report usage, accompanied with a drop in “lack of understanding” support tickets. And through sustained change management, 250+ trained data champions adopted the self-service method, fostering innovation with newer analytics use cases.
InfoCepts helped our customer improve the quality of analytics use, progressing from basic queries to advanced data science for reimagining correlations, forecasts, and targeted marketing. Within the self-service paradigm, the Collective Intelligence portal helps it advance data-driven capabilities to make datasets, reports, and existing intellectual property more accessible across the enterprise.
Higher concurrency with the cloud platform helped save about four hours in daily data load cycle with over 20% improvement in query performance. This helped improve latency and enhance the user experience.
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