Business Objects Customers: SourceMedia

SourceMedia

"Without a comprehensive BI and EIM solution, we weren't maximizing the value of our customer data. Now we'll spend a lot less time digging for data - and a lot more time analyzing it."
Ivan Latanision
chief technology officer
SourceMedia

Challenge

SourceMedia is a business-to-business publishing company that provides market information to financial services and related industries through its publications, industry-standard data applications, seminars, and conferences. Its flagship publications, including American Banker, National Mortgage News, The Bond Buyer, and Accounting Today - plus the premier business intelligence (BI), analytics, and data warehousing magazine DMReview - have helped build SourceMedia’s reputation as the preeminent information source in its respective markets.

Lack of Access to Data Caused Lack of Focus on Selling

With products that have been in existence for more than 170 years, SourceMedia has accumulated an enormous amount of customer information. The challenge, however, has been in managing and exploiting this information. With 25 disparate data systems, the company had no way of aggregating and correlating data to get a complete picture across different product lines and customer types. SourceMedia could neither tell who was doing what business across its advertising, subscription, or software products - nor could it determine what relationships existed between parent companies and subsidiaries.

"On a consistent basis, it was nearly impossible to name our top customers across all of our product lines," says Ivan Latanision, chief technology officer at SourceMedia. "Compiling that data involved considerable manual labor. In fact, we'd start from scratch each month, spending a few days creating a report on just the company’s top advertisers."

As a result, SourceMedia's sales representatives were spending too much time digging up data that should have been readily available - and not enough time focusing on cross-selling and upselling strategies. They needed a way to gather information quickly and easily so they could speak intelligently to customers on how SourceMedia's products or advertising campaigns were meeting - or could meet - their specific business needs.

Approach

With a long-term vision of establishing an enterprise information management (EIM) system, SourceMedia first sought to do some corporate householding to better understand the hierarchical structure of customer organizations, as well as to build more sophisticated customer networks.

"The need to invest in the integrity of our information was a no-brainer," says Latanision. "A combination of BI, data integration, and data quality technologies would let us assemble our data more easily to better understand our customers and grow business."

SourceMedia wanted a single vendor that offered a complete BI solution, including ETL (extract, transform, load) and data quality. It also wanted to simplify reporting and analysis sharing, so that when anyone created a report, all relevant users could access it.

Business Objects Offered a Complete BI Solution

"Though we met with Cognos," says Latanision, "our decision to go with Business Objects was an easy one. First, I’m a big fan of Firstlogic - which Business Objects recently acquired - and so the level of integration the ETL solution from Business Objects had with Firstlogic data quality tools was a huge plus. Secondly, Cognos doesn't have an integrated data quality tool, which I feel is a critical requirement for an EIM solution." "With Business Objects," continues Latanision, "we could also leverage our existing expertise with Crystal Reports. And we'd be getting a dashboard product that's easy to navigate and provides a great interface for analysts who want to drill down."

After choosing BusinessObjects™ Data Integrator, SourceMedia’s first step was to pull data from six accounts-receivable systems - on approximately 1 million customers - into a data warehouse. Next, the company plans to use data quality tools for data parsing, standardization, correction, matching, and consolidation.

Upon completion of corporate householding, SourceMedia would eventually like to shift a portion of its traditionally print-based business online. By integrating its data warehouse with a web click-stream solution, the company could see where people navigate on their sites, how much time they spend in different areas, and what content brings in the most traffic. With this knowledge, SourceMedia foresees improving insight into customer needs, enhancing support for advertisers, and identifying new product opportunities.

Results

"A foundation of trusted information is critical," says Latanision, "and a big piece of our long-term strategy relies on having the Business Objects infrastructure in place. While we initially are seeking to enhance reporting, our goal over time is to begin more trends analysis and data mining. As we get additional senior managers onto the system, dashboards and web analytics will come more into play."

By integrating internal data sources and creating a single view of corporate information, SourceMedia already anticipates minimizing the time it spends searching for and manipulating data - and maximizing the time it spends on data analysis. It also plans to eliminate reliance on IT to create reports, and to improve customer support by having a single, complete view of customer data. By achieving a better understanding of customer patterns and behavior and by obtaining demographic information to use in segmenting customers, the company will be able to start identifying new revenue opportunities for cross-selling, upselling, and product innovations that will also help grow its online presence.

"Without a comprehensive BI and EIM solution," says Latanision, "we weren’t maximizing the value of customer data. Now we’ll spend a lot less time digging for data - and a lot more time analyzing it."