Exco Partners have experience in the development of IT Strategy spanning the multiple dimensions of an IT operation including: 



<ul><li>Operating model design</li><li>Architecture roadmap</li><li>Service Management</li><li>Capability modelling, benchmarking and uplift</li><li>Organisation design</li><li>Governance and Enterprise Portfolio Management</li><li>Ways of Working</li></ul>



As an example, Exco Partners have recently work with a global Health Insurer and market leader in Australia.&nbsp; The organisation has over 20,000 employees and offers spanning Health Insurance, Aged Care, Dental, Optical and Government services.&nbsp;&nbsp;



A CIO driven imperative was to modernize their technology platform, systems and operating model to deliver scalability, and embrace new ways of working.&nbsp; Exco Partners led the delivery of the IT strategy which included: 



<ul><li>An IT Strategy that was focused on end-to-end enterprise outcomes </li><li>A prioritized roadmap centered on systems, processes and people </li><li>Establishing pro-active senior business partnering roles for each business unit&nbsp; </li><li>Creating a service catalogue and business driven service levels </li><li>Transformation away from on-premise systems to SaaS and cloud-based solutions </li><li>Early adoption of Agile and DevOps based ways of working for targeted areas and projects</li><li>Employee engagement, training and cross skilling opportunities.&nbsp; This led to the highest employee engagement scores at the organisation</li></ul>

chess

Health Insurer IT Strategy

Exco Partners was engaged to implement a customer engagement initiative targeting an immersive and personalised online channel experience for a large international automotive replacement parts organisation.



Data analysis identified a propensity for members to purchase once for a specific need. The hypothesis was that harnessing all of the business&#8217;s vehicle data and matching it to a consumer&#8217;s&nbsp;registration, would allow a car enthusiast could engage in their B2C channel with products, offers and insights&nbsp;tailored to their specific vehicle.&nbsp; It was felt that this would have an immediate impact on sales as well as brand loyalty (shown in&nbsp;repeat visits to the online store).



<h3>Our method</h3>



Purchase data was gathered and analyzed to understand the size and scale of the opportunity (to inform a business case) and to baseline current ‘repeat’ buying by dimension (product, location, car manufacturer and vehicle model) and confirm the viability for using customer registration information in the way needed to provide an accurate result.



The user journey was assessed as part of the overall design and analysis process.&nbsp; The analysis helped to understand that the technology capability needed to deliver the required experience.



The data analysis continued after launch to gain further insight and to particularly cater for quality and error handling scenarios.



For example, the data analysis identified a scenario where “vehicle registration” errors would occur and prevent the consumer for accessing the correct vehicle information and parts, resulting in bounces and/or abandoned carts.



The analysis lead to the implementation of a change to allow for a consumer to identify the issue which would be flagged with a member of customer service for follow up and resolution prior to their next visit to the site.



Whilst the lower-level customer considerations were included as above, the secondary “customer” of a partner wishing to use this service were also considered.&nbsp; In this case security considerations were applied as well as identifying which data a partner had access to (by level) and how they would seamlessly incorporate the API into their technology stack were also part of the architecture.&nbsp;



Within 3 months of first release a total of 10 partners had been able to incorporate the service with little to no technical code changes or deployments needed.&nbsp; This frictionless architecture was a core component of the overall benefit of the solution.



From the initial data analysis insight, Exco Partners defined the user stories, gathered and agreed the specific business requirements from Business, Security, Data and Technology stakeholders, and then designed the technical solution and led the development team to build the API solution.



<h3>The outcome</h3>



Since go-live, the business has seen a significant improvement in ‘repeat’ buying and other identified metrics of loyalty program member aligned purchases as well as an overall increase in the revenue generation of the B2C channel (measured before and after the release of this feature).&nbsp; Additionally, channel partnerships have been established with product suppliers who are utilising this customer to registration API embedded in their own go-to-market channels resulting in more product sales and stronger, more aligned industry partnership models.

car-sunset

Automotive Data Strategy, Analytics & Insight

Are we spending our Business Intelligence and Analytics Budget where it matters most? The gap between the haves and have-nots only seems to be widening. While a lot of progress has been made, many organisations rush to adopt the latest technology without laying appropriate foundations. Others spend so much time laying the foundations that they lose momentum.



It is not through a lack of spending. Analytics has never had as much C-Level “support” as it does today. But is this investment providing the return on investment expected?



I have spent a lot of time leading analytics, business intelligence and visualization projects (and working with vendors). As is often the case, the rush to deploy the latest technology only results in the true benefits being overlooked. I have seen many organisations simply convert spreadsheets to “shiny” dashboards with limited value added (99.999% replication of the spreadsheet).



Shouldn’t we hold our data and analytics investments up to the same standard that we apply to other parts of the business? Of course, we should. Let’s face it, the outputs and deliverables from analytics projects often face the same challenges that other projects encounter. We ship a dashboard into production but don’t follow up to make sure it is used, that it is used as intended and if there is opportunity to improve the business outcome with just a few small tweaks.



The problem likely has nothing to do with the technology. So, what can you do? Benchmarking is popular. There is no shortage of maturity models from consulting firms. The most famous being the Gartner Analytics Maturity Model. Thomas Davenport has established the DELTA model. There are many other variations and extensions to these models and&nbsp;many&nbsp;have&nbsp;common elements.



Gartner’s early analytics model (they have iterated on this a few times now) focuses primarily on an organisations ability to progress through levels of technical competency to achieve increasing value). <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u8UJVPyVy5w">Davenport’s DELTA</a> model is more wholistic and focused on aspects of an organisations ability to execute (across Data, Enterprise, Leadership, Target and Analyst). Another lens to consider is your organisation&#8217;s ability to manage a portfolio of analytics projects and measuring the organisation’s ability to capture value from these investments.



I would argue that on almost any maturity model it would be best to build confidence in your ability to capture value from your analytics investment than to prematurely move to the next level (being able to solve a problem with analytics is not the same as enabling the business to benefit from that knowledge). Being able to demonstrate the link between analytics investments and business outcomes is essential to convince stakeholders to give you permission to solve the organisations most valuable problems. It will also enable you to establish the capability to embed more advanced capabilities into business systems and processes, compounding your investment.



Does your analytics team know how to make good investments? Are they able to effectively manage a portfolio of initiatives that are aligned to business strategy? Can they demonstrate that their investments provide an ROI and do the business stakeholders agree with this assertion?

July 2021

Health Insurer IT Strategy

Automotive Data Strategy, Analytics & Insight

Business analytics, a waste of money