Business Impact Article - Posted 10/19/2007
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Better Business Intelligence Helps ITV Keep on Top
ITV is the largest commercial TV company in the United Kingdom (U.K.), with almost 50 per cent market share and an annual spend of around £1 billion (U.S.$1.98 billion) on programming. ITV worked with Microsoft Gold Certified Partner IMGroup to create a business intelligence platform offering highly sophisticated analytics and reports. The platform comprises Microsoft SQL Server™ 2005 Integration Services, Analysis Services, Reporting Services, Microsoft Office SharePoint® Portal Server 2003, and Microsoft Office Excel®.
Steve Bottomley thinks pressure is good. The Director of Business Strategy of ITV admits that too much stress is harmful, though he is certain too little is far from ideal.
“There is nothing more frustrating than being paralysed by inaccessible information and having to fiddle around with data to get to it.”
– STEVE BOTTOMLEY, Director of Business, ITV
Just the right amount, he believes, and you are inspired. “People come into the media industry,” he says, “because it’s an interesting, buzzy environment, where you regularly work under pressure. For me and many others it’s inspirational. We thrive on it.”
Bottomley is well aware that pressure can sometimes lead to frustration. Heading up a team that forecasts TV viewing, he helps ITV optimise the commercial value of ad breaks. In the language of television, he provides data to maximise commercial impacts―an impact represents one viewer watching a 30-second ad break. Delivering this kind of data involves crunching millions of numbers and presenting the information in a clear and understandable way to give insight into programme performance.
Big Budgets, Massive Data Sets
Bottomley has a heavy workload. ITV is the largest commercial TV company in the United Kingdom (U.K.), with almost 50 per cent market share and an annual spend of around £1 billion (U.S.$1.98 billion) on programming. And, in the TV industry, watchdogs produce guidelines to control how broadcasters maximise commercial impacts across all demographics. When you understand all this, you understand the forces under which Bottomley operates every day.
Ask the Director of Business Strategy and his team and they say they’re okay with an intense workload. But recently, if there was one thing they could change, it would be the hours spent putting figures into a format that executives understood. “There is nothing more frustrating than being paralysed by inaccessible information and having to fiddle around with data to get to it,” he says.
The problem was the result of working with disparate IT systems—a legacy from the birth of ITV. The company was created in 2004 after the merger of the two largest individual ITV broadcasters Granada and Carlton. Bottomley and his team inherited systems from both companies and sometimes the technical knowledge needed to extract information effectively went beyond the IT-savvy director.
He says: “We could turn around data on an individual programme reasonably quickly if we knew its whereabouts in the legacy data systems. But if we didn’t, we needed to pinpoint the individual who could deliver the information—remember we have 6,000 or so employees, so identifying the right individual could be problematic.”
Crunch Time
For Bottomley, crunch time came when the team had to provide a return on investment (ROI) figure for Drama, whose annual budget is approximately £225 million (U.S.$440 million).The figure took six weeks to generate and was only 85 per cent accurate. Next, a request came in for the same ROI figure for Entertainment. “It was just too hard. We tried but couldn’t do it, and this was unacceptable.”
Better Intelligence
The two directors listed their requirements for the new system:
• Excellent performance to consolidate information from a variety of sources including the Broadcasters’ Audience Research Board (BARB) and internal departments.
• Reliability and superior analytical capabilities to rapidly provide users with an integrated view of both the external and internal worlds of ITV.
At a less technical level, Whitfield pinpoints what the new system, described as a data warehouse, would give the company―business intelligence. He says: “The data warehouse would give timely access to vital information, accessible to around 50 people in a number of teams within ITV. In addition, it would give us the ability to monitor and understand viewing behaviours and improve accuracy in forecasting audiences.” With this kind of insight, ITV would gain a competitive advantage over media agencies and other media owners who would not have the capability to analyse data as effectively as this.
Whitfield researched the market for possible solutions. He spoke to technology-related research company Gartner and major IT vendors. Whitfield also looked at the existing ITV infrastructure, specifically with business value in mind. Based on feedback from Gartner and his own assessment, Bottomley learned that Microsoft® technologies most closely matched the company’s aims.
From this point, the situation moved rapidly. Whitfield says: “We spoke with Microsoft, which provided the right level of expertise for this kind of implementation. We then prepared a business case internally for our investment committee, which approved the plan.”
Flexible and Easy-to-Use Platform
ITV worked with Microsoft Gold Certified Partner IMGroup to create a business intelligence platform offering highly sophisticated analytics and reports. The platform comprises Microsoft SQL Server™ 2005 Integration Services, Analysis Services, Reporting Services, Microsoft Office SharePoint® Portal Server 2003, and Microsoft Office Excel®. The business intelligence platform also includes the Microsoft-owned ProClarity Desktop and Analytics Server software—creating an end-to-end Microsoft business intelligence (BI) solution. By using ProClarity technology, which also includes web parts, users gain advanced analytics through a SharePoint Portal Server environment.
With the technology’s excellent interoperability, deployment ran smoothly. However, the success of the data warehouse, to a large extent, relied on meeting the qualitative controls to do with processing data from BARB. The organisation provides estimates of the number of people watching television—the cornerstone for pricing models around TV ads. To avoid disputes, BARB has created a gold standard methodology about processing this data that broadcasters need to comply with.
Hitting the Gold Standard
To meet this gold standard, the new ITV data warehouse would have to break new ground. Whitfield explains: “Currently, there are less than 10 media companies in the world that can deliver this methodology, and all of these have deployed IBM mainframes.” All parties worked together to ensure the new data warehouse could meet this quality threshold and the investment paid off. Whitfield says: “We achieved the gold standard methodology using SQL Server technology—the first time it had been tried in the industry. It really highlighted the advanced capabilities of the software.”
Of course, Whitfield also had the challenge of the data warehouse, storing around 220 gigabytes of data, and processing huge quantities of information quickly. The figures added up to 14 million rows of data pouring into the data warehouse daily and a processing window that ended with the following day’s business. “Modelling the data correctly was crucial,” he says. “It took a long time and we had to validate our models with all the key users and work with IMGroup to apply them.”
Despite the challenges, deployment went well—a result of the experience and expertise of IMGroup. Whitfield says: “I was impressed with the company’s professionalism, and pleased with the excellent level of customer service delivered.” Labelled the Business Data Warehouse, the solution went live in the second half of 2005.
Rapid Adoption, Better Working
For ITV, the data warehouse and Microsoft BI solution is slotting easily into the working lives of employees. People find familiar interfaces such as Excel, SharePoint Portal Server, SQL Reporting Services, and ProClarity simple to use, and training has been minimal, saving the business resources. Employees are keen to exploit the productivity gains from having business intelligence readily available.
Whitfield comments: “Since implementation, we have seen a significant reduction in the time required to provide essential, actionable intelligence, which has improved efficiency. It has also helped various business groups within ITV to make better, more informed decisions with greater speed.”
The Business Data Warehouse is a highly innovative solution within the TV industry. Up to now, few TV companies have succeeded in developing a data warehouse with the qualities to meet the BARB Gold Standard―and none have used a Microsoft-based platform. But, with the support of Microsoft and IMGroup, ITV has created a data warehouse and BI solution, built on SQL Server 2005 that meets all the quality thresholds and drives business.
Encouraging Innovation, Driving New Solutions
Yet this isn’t the only first that ITV has achieved with its new data warehouse. Whitfield and his colleagues have exploited the flexibility of the platform to include hypothetical modelling. For employees, this provides real-time insight into operations, supporting better forecasts. For example, users can create predictive schedules and then integrate this data back into the warehouse to provide real-time analytics for key performance indicators (KPIs).
Dig to a deeper technical level, and you can see that ITV and its partners succeeded in taking the technology behind the data warehouse and tailoring it to the company’s specific business needs. Whitfield says: “The platform encourages innovation. We have made extensive use of its features to drive business intelligence.”
Supports a Changing Market
TV regulation in the U.K. has changed to help maintain a competitive environment. The introduction of contract right renewal―a mechanism to avoid monopolistic pricing―and the focus on commercial impacts put a strong emphasis on managing and analysing large and complex data sets. The Business Data Warehouse gives ITV the tools to meet these challenges.
Now, with the technology in place, ITV can comply with industry regulations and protect its commercial revenues. With graphical data at their fingertips showing current performance, executives can quickly make the right decisions to maximise their relationships with partners and customers. What’s more, the company can avoid the expense of buying analysis data from third parties, which often did not integrate well with internal data at ITV.
In the longer term, as the industry continues to evolve, this kind of insight will be invaluable. Digital services are upon us and the current analogue service―by far the most popular today―is being axed in 2010. For companies such as ITV, this creates uncertainty because with digital services it faces hundreds of competitors. But with the SQL Server 2005 solution in place, Bottomley and his team will provide continuous insight into the population’s viewing habits, helping ITV to track the profitability of programmes easily. It puts the company in a much stronger position when deciding what programmes will attract the majority of digital viewers.
Maintaining the Buzz, Enticing New Recruits
Bottomley is looking forward to the challenges ahead, certain he can provide the data to keep the business on track. In addition, he knows that he’s not alone in benefiting day to day from the power of the data warehouse. “It will deliver great benefits to other departments such as research, advertising sales, and knowledge management,” he says.
He can now look back and smile about the time when it took weeks to accumulate, reconcile, and present data to highlight the company’s KPIs. For Bottomley and the 50 people using the data warehouse, all that labour is reduced to the click of a button. “I entered the media industry with the sense of it being a buzzy environment. It would be sad if it lost that appeal in the eyes of the talented youngsters I employ. I think now we’re in a better place to maintain that outlook. And pressure? I can’t imagine my life without it. It keeps you on your toes.”
For more information about ITV, please visit:
http://www.itv.com/
For more information about IMGroup, please visit:
http://www.imgroup.com/
For more information on how business intelligence (BI) can affect your company and how to get greater quality BI, please visit:
www.microsoft.com/sql/solutions/bi or www.microsoft.com/sql/prodinfo/overview
For more information on People Ready Business and how it can help your business please visit:
www.microsoft.com/business/peopleready
© 2007 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.
This document is for informational purposes only. MICROSOFT MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, IN THIS SUMMARY.
Microsoft is a registered trademark of Microsoft Corporation in the United States and/or other countries. The names of actual companies and products mentioned herein may be the trademarks of their respective owners.
