About the client
A Fortune 100 telecommunications and mass media provider with customers all across North America. Through a combination of market growth and strategic acquisitions, the company has established itself as one of the largest corporate operations in the United States.
Overview
Today’s enterprises face unique challenges when it comes to maximizing their technology landscipe to enhance their multi-faceted operations. Key business processes and departmental functions are often based upon legacy and siloed systems that make it difficult for decision-makers to leverage the full potential of the organization’s data and maximize value. As companies seek to achieve true digital transformation, it’s important for their internal stakeholders to collaborate effectively to identify opportunities for modernization and establish practices that support continuous improvement.
These challenges are especially critical for organizations that have undergone substantial growth and acquisitions over the last twenty years. The rapid proliferation of cloud-based solutions, advancements in big data analytics, and innovations in DevOps practices can be difficult to incorporate across multiple departments and subsidiaries, each of which may be dependent upon its own tech stack, applications, and processes. Working with a trusted partner who can facilitate communication and coordination between technical and business stakeholders can serve as a powerful accelerator for digital transformation initiatives.
When the client’s database marketing department needed to accelerate an initiative to integrate data drawn from multiple sources for their residential and commercial campaigns, they turned to the experts at BRQ for the resources to get the project completed earlier. With each success, BRQ’s involvement expanded to provide additional support and help the company overcome siloed operations to accelerate its digital evolution.
Challenges
The initial challenge facing the database marketing department involved integrating customer data sets from multiple CRM systems. This data is essential for building targeted campaigns, measuring campaign effectiveness, and understanding consumer behavior. Prior to BRQ’s involvement, some key campaign data was managed on spreadsheets, which required time-consuming manual labor and was prone to human error. There was also no mechanism in place for attributing inbound sales calls to active campaigns, making it difficult for the marketing team to measure results.
Data quality was also an issue, and the time spent addressing production issues caused a further project delay
Solutions
BRQ began by embedding resources within the database marketing team to help them develop a scalable framework for continuous data testing. Improving data quality not only allowed the integration project to get back on schedule, but also created new opportunities for data analysis. BRQ brought in additional developer resources with experience communicating directly with business stakeholders, which allowed them to integrate quickly and serve as a bridge between marketing and technical teams.
The team used their expertise in application design and architecture to build a portal the marketing team could use to manage campaign metadata, offer inventories, and campaign results through an intuitive dashboard. These improvements allowed the marketing team to quickly analyze data to create new campaigns based on actionable insights. At the same time, the data quality framework was expanded to automate key testing functions and ensure that any irregularities or errors could be identified and addressed quickly.
As the project continued to evolve, the marketing team wanted to have access to more real time data on customer activity, which was not possible within their architecture. BRQ’s experienced engineers worked closely with decisionmakers to identify what kind of data was needed and provide an assessment of options for managing it. The conversations resulted in an actionable plan for migrating key assets to the AWS cloud, which BRQ’s resources helped to design and execute. Transitioning select data and workloads to the cloud allowed the company to scale rapidly and be more profitable than their competitors.
BRQ began working with other departments to assist them in their challenges. Alongside these technical projects, BRQ also brought process innovation to the organization’s engineering and IT teams. The team implemented an Agile framework for development and production support, which greatly enhanced visibility for what resources were working on and how much time was being committed to various tasks. This provided management with the ability to make crucial decisions about which projects to prioritize and allowed them to make those changes with a clear understanding of the business tradeoffs.
BRQ also took on the responsibility of handling service provisioning for some of the organization’s complex legacy systems. Drawing from Brazil’s deep pool of technical talent, BRQ built an experienced team that had worked together previously and understood how to coordinate within a siloed enterprise environment. The team learned the complex legacy systems, suggested and implement automation improvements. The leadership team also asked some of our team to participate in the architecture for a new provisioning platform. Their success coincided with additional BRQ resources coming aboard to build DevOps and CI/CD pipelines.
Results
A successful digital transformation effort requires more than simply upgrading infrastructure and launching new products. It calls for a fundamental reassessment of how operational practices interface with business technology and empower employees across every department and function to deliver scalable business value. To achieve these objectives, companies must find a way to transform strategic vision into reality through effective planning and execution.
By delivering experienced resources that understand how to coordinate between multiple siloes, BRQ helped a Fortune 100 enterprise accelerate its digital transformation without causing disruption or imposing costly business tradeoffs. Since BRQ’s teams have already worked together and bring direct industry experience, they were able to embed within the client’s existing departments to function as an extension of their workforce. At the same time, a proven track record of success over time provided them the credibility needed to present a strategic vision, take steps to implement it, and then oversee the results.
Rather than undertaking a lengthy, top-down transformation effort that could take five to six years, the company accelerated its evolution with a strategic partner that worked every day to improve critical operations and infrastructure from the inside within just two years. Working within the company allowed the BRQ team to build the relationships essential for effective collaboration.
That commitment to building long-term success on a foundation of everyday progress is what sets BRQ apart from other technology partners. With a deep pool of experienced talent to draw upon in North America and the near shore market of Brazil, our team understands how to embed within organizations effectively to accelerate strategic and technical outcomes. Talk to us today to learn how we can take your critical projects from vision to execution.
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