CASE STUDY:

News Australia – Creating a customer centric technology road map for advertising sales

Client Profile:

News Australia is Australia’s number one media company. With advertising sales revenues in excess of $1bn per annum and market leading titles such as The Australian, the Daily Telegraph, GQ and Australian Vogue, News Australia is a dominant force in national media.

Background:

The published media market is changing rapidly. The industry is seeing a dramatic shift from traditional printed publications to online and digital media. Consequently, the Advertising Sales (AdSales) division of News Australia decided to transform itself from an organisation aligned around individual printed publications to one where its sales professionals are equipped to sell an audience to advertisers across print and digital media and across a broad range of the 100+ published titles and 300+ websites that News Australia owns.

Client Objective:

As part of this transformation, News needed a clear Technology Road Map to underpin and enable the people and process transformation. This Road Map and associated Business Case had to reflect the needs of the transformed business, be demonstrably aligned to the needs of the customer and be achievable in the medium term. Above all, the Road Map had to be created over a six week period, consistent with the need to move forward at pace.

Seven Consulting Solution:

• A comprehensive understanding of customer needs and the experience that customers should have and deserve in the transformed world
• A Capability Model that clearly identified the business and technology components required to deliver on these needs
• A Technology Architecture that described the application and technology components required to deliver these capabilities and support the transformed business
• A Two Year Road Map laying out the projects required to deliver the technology, mindful of the IT investment already made and the inflight projects that would contribute to the target architecture
• A three year business case that identified the key efficiency and revenue enhancement opportunities over this period and the funding to make it happen

Client Outcome:

All of this work was delivered on time and to budget, in line with a set of milestones pre-agreed with News Australia.

The work enabled News to

• Generate substantial momentum across the business and IT organisations to move the work forward
• Align business and technology goals in a way not previously achieved
• Mobilise business and technology staff to work on a common solution, driven by a common understanding of customer need
• Implement a credible, achievable, properly funded plan based on this understanding.