CASE STUDY The Path Toward Pervasive Business Intelligence at Revol Wireless

Sponsored by: Jaspersoft

September 2008

SUMMARY
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The trend toward evidence-based decision-making is taking root in commercial, non-profit and public sector organizations. Driven by increased competition due to changing business models, deregulation or, in some cases, increased regulation in the form of new compliance requirements, organizations in all industries and of all sizes are turning to business intelligence (BI) and data warehousing (DW) technologies and services to either automate or support decision-making processes. An increasing number of organizations are making BI functionality more pervasively available to all decision makers, be they executives or customer-facing employees, line-of-business managers or suppliers. IDC defines pervasive BI as follows: Pervasive BI results when organizational culture, business processes and technologies are designed and implemented with the goal of improving the strategic and operational decision-making capabilities of a wide range of internal and external stakeholders. Despite the fact that the term Business Intelligence was first coined in 1958 and the first BI software tools emerged in the 1970's, BI is not truly pervasive in any organization. As organizations identify more stakeholders who can benefit from improved decision-making capabilities, they are choosing to deploy BI and thus come increasingly closer to achieving pervasive BI. For organizations struggling with changing organizational structure and culture, business and IT processes and technologies, several lessons can be learned by examining the best practices organizations employ on their path toward achieving pervasive BI.

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METHODOLOGY
In 2008 IDC launched a global market research project with the goal of uncovering best practices in expanding the use of BI and analytics processes and technologies. The research project was underwritten by eleven competing BI software, services and hardware providers. The project methodology, which was developed by IDC and contributors from Boston University School of Management Information Systems department included both a survey of over 1100 private and public sector organizations in 11 countries and in-depth interviews with 22 of these organizations resulting in a series of case studies on best practices in achieving pervasive BI. One of the organizations interviewed was Revol.

ORG ANIZ ATION

Revol Wireless, a privately held company with headquarters in Cleveland, Ohio, owns and operates an all-digital CDMA wireless network serving metropolitan areas in Ohio and Indiana. According to Revol, the company has built a different kind of wireless company, offering customers "what they really want out of their wireless provider" - unlimited local, long distance, text messaging and mobile internet service for a flat monthly rate; without long-term contracts or security deposits. Revol's high quality, all digital wireless network provides the platform to offer truly unlimited service at an affordable price to customers long under-served or over-charged by traditional providers. According to the company, Revol service is designed to appeal to customers who value unlimited calling and desire to have a predictable monthly bill. Revol, which has about 500 employees, operates 40 company-owned retail stores and has nearly 300 independent agents who sell handsets and flat-rate, "pay-as-you-go " service plans to customers.

SITUATION OVERVIEW
Business Drivers
Like all organizations that took part in IDC's research project, Revol was influenced by both external and internal factors that triggered a need to re-evaluate its decision-making processes and the supporting BI and analytics technology architecture. These business drivers were both strategic and operational.

Strategic
Revol's need for a new BI solution was driven by the competitive nature of the wireless services market and the company's revenue structure. Revol derives its revenue from customers who undergo no credit checks, have no contracts with the company, and are not subject to service termination fees. In this environment, where Revol has 5 - 10 competitors in each of its local markets, the company has to ensure it provides customers with superior service on a daily basis or face the immediate loss of any given customer. It was critical for Revol's decision makers to have accurate and actionable performance information to execute its strategy. For example, given the lower cost of retaining a customer than acquiring a new one, Revol's management needed a way to monitor customer churn and the factors influencing churn in order to be able to take corrective action. Revol's management was interested in creating a performance management culture that would improve employees' accountability to goals through the widespread availability of operational, financial, and customer-centric metrics and BI tools to access and analyze them.

Operational
Operationally, Revol had been in start-up mode for the first 2.5 years of its existence. During this period the company was focused almost exclusively on launching new markets, building networks, customer acquisition and the supporting point of sale and call center applications. However, as Revol moved out of start-up to a managed growth stage, the company's management found it was outgrowing its initial systems, among them the rudimentary reporting tools. In its initial growth phase, Revol deployed multiple operational systems, which by 2007 resulted in silos of rapidly growing data sources. As a result, it was difficult to turn this data into information for supporting decision-making processes. Business end users did not find the data to be reliable, nor did the existing BI tools provide sufficient

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functionality for analyzing data by various dimensions, such as by market or by store. Although Revol's management knew which metrics it wanted to track, the manual processes for aggregating, reconciling and presenting data were time consuming and error prone. The company's lack of actionable information spurred it to pursue a new BI solution that could aggregate and relate data generated by Revol's disparate transactional systems, and deliver it to decision makers on a timely basis.

SOLUTION
Towards Pervasive Business Intelligence
To address its BI and analytics needs, Revol embarked on a path toward pervasive BI that would require changes to the organization's culture, technologies, and business and IT processes.

Organizational Culture
Perhaps the biggest change undertaken under the guidance of the IT group was to bring the organization together to establish a common language for BI and analytics. This included the creation of data governance processes whereby different business stakeholders were asked to agree on a common set of definitions for various data elements. For example, in the past, different employees from different departments would have different definitions of what is a service subscriber. As George Mehok, CIO of Revol said, "it was very important for us to set up a data governance committee and to bring users together to define a common data dictionary." After gaining executive support for the BI project, Mehok and his team established a plan to involve a broad group of stakeholders in the development and deployment of the BI solution. Under this plan, involvement from the management team and business users was used to ensure organizational acceptance and adoption of the BI solution. It was also important for Revol to categorize the needs and requirements of each of its various users groups to ensure that appropriate BI technology would be available to decision makers at different levels and in various departments of the organization. Mehok described his breakdown of such a BI solution as follows: ! Dashboarding for measuring performance against predefined metrics, such as evaluation of actual versus budgeted results. This exception based data visualization method is used to support sales, marketing, and customer service management teams. ! Operational reporting for describing predefined data at recurring time intervals, such as daily, weekly, monthly or quarterly, through tables and charts. This type of BI functionality is used as an input into operational process such as financial management by the finance group. ! Analytics for exploring data as input to the strategic planning process, to understand exceptions occurring in business processes, evaluate root-causes of under-performing metrics, uncover new opportunities, and validate assumptions. As the company began to reassess its BI technology requirements, the IT team realized the need to provide the various dashboards, reports and analysis tools based on a centralized DW that was updated on, at least, a daily basis with operational data. Reaching this goal would help meet Revol's cultural bias toward decision-making based on facts rather than assumptions.

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Technology
The first priority for Revol's IT group was to develop a centralized DW based on a common data model that would enable consistent support for end users' query, reporting, and analysis needs. This included identifying and prioritizing the various data sources including customer databases, network usage, product databases, etc. Revol selected database software from Oracle as the basis for its DW platform. After the launch of the DW development project, Revol began to evaluate potential end user BI tools that would provide the appropriate functionality for reporting, dashboarding and ad-hoc analysis as well as have the performance characteristics and a pricing model that would support the expected wide deployment of the technology throughout the company. One of the software packages evaluated was the free, open source version of JasperServer from BI software vendor Jaspersoft. Revol's IT group used it for initial testing. Upon satisfactory performance of Jaspersoft's reporting as well as data extraction, transformation and loading (ETL) software, Revol deployed the software for "back end" BI architecture. However, while the free, open source version of JasperServer fulfilled IT group's needs, Revol decided that it needed more "user friendly" front-end BI functionality for business end users. Revol, therefore evaluated additional BI software packages, among them JasperServer Professional or the commercial version of the software. The company was impressed with the data visualization, self-service dashboard creation, and ad-hoc analysis functionality of the JasperServer Professional product and decided to expand the use of Jaspersoft. Jaspersoft was selected because of its functionality, fit with Revol's broader IT architecture that included various open source software (including Linux, Apache, and PHP), availability of internal IT staff with open source software experience, and Jaspersoft's attractive software licensing model. The licensing model was a key determinant to Revol as it sought the right BI tool. Jaspersoft's enterprise license option meant that Revol could add users as needed without needing to increase its software license budget each time it did so. The attractive pricing option was especially important to Revol's CIO, who characterized his vision for the BI solution as "BI beyond power users and reporting." In other words, Revol wanted to provide access to BI functionality not only to a few analysts and executives, but also to front line employees, including store managers, call center supervisors, and even call center representatives. To fulfill this vision, a typical per user software licensing model would have been cost prohibitive.

Business and IT Processes

Revol chose a phased approach to deploy the new BI solution throughout the organization. The fourmonth DW development project was followed by the development and deployment of a first set of dashboards. One of the first of these was a sales dashboard, which was developed in collaboration between Mehok and Revol's new Vice President of Sales. Mehok first approached the VP of Sales to gather requirements for sales reporting. This request for reporting requirements went initially unanswered. Mehok then presented the VP of Sales with a white board "mock-up" of a sales dashboard. Because of the visual nature of the dashboard prototyping process, the VP of Sales was thus able to provide valuable input, resulting in a collaborative approach between Sales and IT throughout the development of the initial prototypes. The first prototype of the dashboard was developed within 2 weeks and following another round of input from sales, the IT group was able to deliver the first formal sales dashboard within a total of 4 weeks. Since the initial deployment, the sales dashboard has been broadened to include not only descriptive KPI's, but also budget versus actual comparisons. In addition, the dashboard is making progress toward another important objective, standardizing company-wide data definitions through the integration of an online data dictionary. The dashboard was soon deployed to 20 users representing store and executive

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management. The success of this initiative acted as a catalyst for participation by other managers who heard about and saw the benefits of the dashboard from a management peer. The iterative development approach using rapid prototyping continues to be used successfully by Revol's IT group, which has no formal, dedicated BI team. Yet, all development has been done by internal resources with phone support and minimal training provided by Jaspersoft. There is a senior IT manager that leads the development of the Jaspersoft dashboards, reports and analytics, the Director of IT Architecture defines the data and ETL structures, half of a full-time-equivalent (FTE) ETL programmer who maintains the DW, one business analyst whose main task is to document business processes, and one 'super-user' who understands the business, data, and has systems expertise to develop the next dashboard. In its effort to create a self-service environment, the IT group has enlisted the help of trained business users for further dashboard development. This approach utilizes the appropriate skills of each user group, with IT focusing on data integration and management, and business users with their business processes expertise, focusing on dashboard development for their respective departments. Revol needed to adapt some of its business processes to account for its growth from a start-up operation to an organization focused on managed growth. While the original focus during the start-up phase was on new customer acquisition and establishment of operational systems and processes, the next phase in Revol's evolution required the addition of the focus on customer retention. Its business model required Revol to understand changes in customer behavior as they occur to avoid excessive churn and provide the right mix of services and handsets to attract new customers. As a result, Revol introduced real-time monitoring (at 15 minute intervals) of certain operational processes and daily evaluation of almost all operational information. At the same time, the centralized DW enabled the company to also analyze historical trends. Together, the near-real-time and historical information, delivered through various BI interfaces, enables Revol's management to adjust their business processes to gain operational efficiencies or to take advantage of new opportunities. For example, management is able to monitor the performance of the service reinstatement process. Once a customer's request for canceled service reinstatement and payment is received by Revol, the service should be reinstated within 12 seconds. If this time is exceeded, the system monitoring the reinstatement process, sends an alert to notify IT management about the delay, which triggers an analysis of the root cause of the delay and initiation of corrective action.

BENEFITS
Revol's BI solution has already played a role in improving the performance of sales, marketing and operations processes. The positive feedback about the new system has come from all levels, including the CEO and VP of Sales as well as line of business management and staff. The management team is now able to see KPIs that guide its actions on a daily and intra-day basis. The company has much more insight into how it is performing against corporate plans. At the same time business users feel greater job satisfaction in the workplace where they can be involved in developing dashboards and analyzing the data, rather than re-creating monthly spreadsheets. "Besides providing better decision-support, the new BI solution has helped reduce development and data management costs, and has provided the unexpected benefit of higher morale among employees previously engaged in highly repetitive report creation process," said Mehok. In other words, Revol has been able to make substantial progress toward providing the right information to the right people at the right time using the right tools.

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The Right Information

! The prerequisite for right information in any organizations is the existence of a common language to describe metrics and data. Revol's data governance efforts supported by its ETL and DW software, have resulted in greater understanding of performance characteristics among managers and staff. With the right information from a single source, Revol is able to act on trusted information to better compete in the market. ! Today the DW aggregates data from multiple operational applications, such as the billing system, the point of sales system, the web site, and door counters at Revol's retail stores. This data is combined with master data about customers, products, and services, allowing Revol's decisionmakers to optimize not only individual processes but also to perform cross-functional analysis. For example, by combining customer service, billing and sales data, Revol is able to identify and subsequently address factors that may lead to customer churn.

The Right People

! The users of the BI solution at Revol include employees from all levels of the company and from most departments. By September 2008, Revol had rolled out its sales dashboard to all employees at the director level or above, which includes store managers. The next phase of the deployment, expected to be completed in October of 2008, will include the roll-out of the BI solution to employees at the supervisor level or above. At that time over 100 users will be accessing dashboards that will inform decisions across the organization. ! The sales dashboard is to be followed by the Marketing and the Churn dashboards, which will be followed by the customer service, finance, and network engineering dashboards. The goal is to incorporate in the BI solution all the necessary information needed to support a performance management methodology such as the Balanced Scorecard. Each new BI asset will increase the available information for existing users as well as spread access to new user groups. At this time, Revol is not providing BI access to any external parties, such as the dealers. However, the company is tracking dealer performance using dashboards and reporting.

The Right Time

! The right time can mean many things. Ultimately data must be captured and then information made available to decision makers at intervals that match the specific business process requirements. At Revol the majority of data is loaded into the DW nightly. The new BI solution has enabled management to monitor and react to changes in customer behavior on a daily basis. ! Some data at Revol is being monitored throughout the day. Sales managers want to see changes in the number of new customer accounts updated in 15 minute intervals. Also, data from the billing system is collected every 15 minutes, so that any spikes in customer activity can be better predicted and then handled by Revol's systems and sales personnel.

The Right Tool

! A BI solution must be able to address not only the needs of various end user groups, but also those of the IT group, in its effort to support ongoing BI needs of end users. At Revol, Jaspersoft technology was first used for ETL, reporting and dashboards, but is being expanded to support adhoc query and analysis needs of analysts and managers. Some BI interfaces provide drill-down functionality to support root-cause analysis, while others allow users to download data into a spreadsheet. All information access is based on role-based security deployed through Revol's use of Microsoft's Active Directory and its integration with Jaspersoft.

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! From the IT and development perspective, the BI solution's low total cost of ownership (as defined by Revol) manifests itself in the cost of the software (based on information provided by Revol the closest alternative was 50% more expensive), resources to maintain it, ease of dashboard and report development using drag-and-drop functionality, and the time saved on the previously suboptimal data integration, reconciliation and report development processes. For example, a request for new information from business users, can be address by the addition of a new ETL routine within 24 hours. As another example, employees who were previously aggregating data into spreadsheet reports were reassigned to higher valued added tasks and projects.

LESSONS LE ARNED
IDC's goal in interviewing Revol was to identify best practices that other organizations can apply in their efforts to make the use of BI and analytics processes and tools more pervasive. Neither Revol nor IDC would claim that the company has fully achieved the goal of having pervasive BI. Nevertheless, there are several important lessons that this case highlights: ! Organizations whose goal is to train business users to develop their own dashboards or reports should focus not only on training such end users on the BI tool, but also on the meaning of data and the relationships among data elements. As Revol learned, even with an easy to use BI toolset, it is important not to underestimate the training effort needed for end users to have a good understanding of the data and business processes to develop informative dashboards and reports. ! A data governance program and a BI technology deployment project does not necessarily require a large team of people. As Revol demonstrated, it is important to have a clear understanding of the strengths of each internal group of stakeholders. By delineating the responsibilities of IT and business users, Revol is able to fulfill its BI needs through a highly collaborative working environment, where IT focuses on data integration and management, and dedicated business users are focused on data governance and report development. ! It is important to recognize that a single BI software functionality will not fulfill the needs of all end users. Revol's vision to have three core components of the BI solution, including reports, dashboards and analytic tools, has been successful in providing the right tool to the right people needing a level of automation to support their decision processes. ! One of the key lessons from this case is the recognition of the importance of a champion to expanding the use of the BI solution throughout the organization. The champion could be a single person or a small team of employees who have the vision and expertise to convince key business stakeholders about the potential positive impact that a BI solution could have on the performance of an organization. Revol's CIO took it upon himself to prototype a dashboard for the VP of Sales and then the IT team developed an actionable solution that demonstrated the potential benefits other managers could derive from participation in the BI initiative. ! BI projects should be viewed as ongoing initiatives that require constant, iterative updates to deliver the right information to the right people. Revol began its deployment of the new BI solution with the sales dashboard and has since then continued to expand the solution to encompass other business processes and departments. With each iteration, the company is able to receive valuable feedback from business users and thus, continuously improve the overall BI solution.

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! Finally, Revol's IT group realized that business end users have no patience for differentiating a prototype from a production version of a dashboard or a report. Once given access to the prototype, end user will start using it for operational decision-making. If the data in the prototype is not accurate, users will lose confidence in the data and the tool, and the project will instantly lose credibility. Thus, Revol's IT group held off deploying the initial sales dashboard to end users until it was able to ensure the highest standard of data quality. "We get only one chance to make the first impression," said Mehok. "After that the important thing is to keep up the momentum by showing every week that the BI solution continues to provide value."

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