Online Media Company Increases Value of Data with Business ...
|Overview | | |“With the alerting and drill-down capacity in the Office SharePoint Server 2007 dashboards, our |
|Country or Region: United States | | |people … will be alerted to potential problems and guided down a path to solve them.” |
|Industry: Media & Entertainment | | |Tom Allan, Director of Finance, Zango |
| | | | |
|Customer Profile | | | |
|Zango, based in Bellevue, Washington, | | | |
|provides free access to videos, games, music,| | | |
|tools, and utilities funded by advertising. | | | |
|The company has 140 employees in six offices | | | |
|around the world. | | | |
| | | | |
|Business Situation | | | |
|Zango wanted to provide its employees with a | | | |
|more focused set of data that would help them| | | |
|make better decisions and take more | | | |
|productive action to enhance advertiser | | | |
|retention. | | | |
| | | | |
|Solution | | | |
|The company engaged Microsoft® Gold Certified| | | |
|Partner Habañero Consulting Group to build a | | | |
|BI dashboard solution based on Microsoft SQL | | | |
|Server® 2005 and Office SharePoint® Server | | | |
|2007. | | | |
| | | | |
|Benefits | | | |
|Helps turn information into action | | | |
|Provides immediate access to relevant | | | |
|information | | | |
|Extends to address new requirements | | | |
| | | |Zango offers online media content to customers at no charge and funds its operations through |
| | | |advertising revenue. To build profitability and enhance advertiser retention, Zango needs an hourly |
| | | |view of audience activity and advertising performance. The company collected a wealth of data in its |
| | | |Microsoft® SQL Server® 2005 database but communicated that data in large, static reports that had |
| | | |limited use. To provide more actionable data, Zango worked with Microsoft Gold Certified Partner |
| | | |Habañero Consulting Group to create a business intelligence (BI) solution based on SQL Server 2005 |
| | | |and Microsoft Office SharePoint® Server 2007. The solution presents dashboards with key performance |
| | | |indicators (KPIs) that can be tailored to each department. Employees can drill down to see the data |
| | | |in greater detail and thus turn information into action, to increase efficiency and enhance client |
| | | |service. |
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|[pic] | | |[pic] |
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Situation
Zango is an online media company that provides consumers with free access to a large catalog of popular online videos, games, music, tools, and utilities, paid for with advertising revenue. This "Content Economy" model works to provide consumers with free access to content because when consumers search or browse online for products and services, they see relevant ads from Zango advertisers. Such targeted product placement helps Zango advertisers gain an industry-leading return for their marketing dollars, which Zango uses to pay Web publishers and content providers for the rights to distribute their creative assets. Zango has millions of opt-in users, and tens of thousands of new consumers opt-in every day. Headquartered in Bellevue, Washington, Zango also has offices in Las Vegas, Nevada; New York City; Montreal; London; and Tel Aviv.
To keep its Content Economy growing, the company’s business intelligence (BI) department used Microsoft® SQL Server 2005 Reporting Services to create reports from a SQL Server 2005 data warehouse running on the Windows Server® 2003 operating system. The problem was that the information in these reports was static, which prevented employees from being able to drill down to analyze the data in more detail. In addition, the report contained no trend information, making it impossible to compare present numbers to past performance.
Employees received so many reports that it was difficult for them to determine what was important. Also, different departments would often report the same information but with different numbers, so employees didn’t know which numbers were correct. “People might get 10 different Web reports e-mailed to them in a day, and each of those was huge and contained tons of data that they would have to find their way through to figure out what was important to the company,” says Tom Allan, Director of Finance for Zango.
Some of the staff had access to existing online analytical processing (OLAP) cubes, which they used to get metrics such as daily and hourly revenue, network traffic, and software download volumes, but it sometimes took 10 or more minutes to complete the query.
“When I took over the BI department in August 2007, we had just acquired one company and were about to acquire a second that added different revenue engines and products,” says Allan. “Despite that, we were still reporting as if we still had only one product.”
The company had plasma screens in its offices showing employees the hourly performance trends of one product, but there were no references to the new products. It wasn’t possible to see results by region, business unit, or brand, and there were no tools that provided insight on how to address a problem or that compared actual performance to established goals.
Those missing capabilities were particularly important at that time because Zango was in the process of restructuring to increase efficiency and profitability. Allan envisioned a solution that would include dashboards and interactive portals that could be tailored for each business unit and would include alerting and drill-down capability.
Solution
After enlisting proof-of-concept proposals from three partners, Zango chose the Habañero Consulting Group, a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner in Canada with offices in Vancouver, British Columbia; Calgary, Alberta; and Regina, Saskatchewan. All three contenders had presented proposals that involved Microsoft Office SharePoint® Server 2007, but Zango chose Habañero for its depth of experience in BI solutions and because its solution could be implemented in discrete, manageable phases. Zango already had the licenses for Office SharePoint Server 2007 because it was upgrading its intranet from Office SharePoint® Portal Server 2003 to take advantage of several new features, including improved integration with Microsoft Office Excel® spreadsheet software and enhanced workflow capabilities.
In October 2007, Habañero spent two weeks interviewing Zango employees to find out what they needed and then translated that information into a BI roadmap for the company. The BI solution mapped out by Habañero started with a proof of concept for a series of dashboards that would present all employees with a visual summary of various sales and revenue data.
Habañero worked with Zango to determine which parameters needed to be presented in those dashboards. Then the partner created four dashboards in Office SharePoint Server 2007, using several built-in Web Parts, including those for SQL Server Reporting Services, Excel Services, and key performance indicators (KPIs). Zango employees then wrote the queries to populate the dashboards.
“Zango management wanted the whole company to be able to access this information to give it greater insight into the data than it had before,” says Kelly Lautt, Business Intelligence Practice Leader for Habañero. “The SharePoint Server 2007 dashboards provided summarized KPIs with the ability to click on them and drill down into the details. These details included trends in graphical form that they could easily customize to see a 90-day rolling trend, a week-to-week trend, or a trend for any custom time period.”
The initial group of dashboards that were created for the proof of concept included:
Advertiser metrics that present revenue in various ways, such as per customer, by geographic area, and by product brand.
Publisher metrics that show software downloads by business unit, brand, and geography, which are important to the online marketing team.
Audience metrics that present data on the total network audience of consumers by various brands and geographies.
A top-level dashboard that summarizes the results from the other three dashboards.
“These KPIs are refreshed hourly and give our internal managers an indication of the health of the business,” says Allan. Each of the four dashboards has a static section that reports the previous day’s results and compares them to the prior week, month to date, and so on. At the bottom of each page is a link that users can click to look at simple graphs and tables showing metrics such as 24-hour rolling revenue and audience numbers. The next level down presents SQL Server Reporting Services reports that provide more comprehensive data.
“Since the SQL Server 2005 database was already there, we didn’t have to create any new measures or record new information; all we did was write stored procedures and queries to populate these dashboards, and Habañero did the rest,” Allan adds.
A group of 6 managers and 12 other users from various departments tested the BI proof of concept starting in February 2008. That initial group was also testing the new intranet capabilities of Office SharePoint Server 2007, so they accessed the dashboards through that portal. After seeing the value of the dashboards in the test group, Zango decided to roll the solution out to the rest of the organization in conjunction with its intranet migration to Office SharePoint Server 2007 at the end of June 2008.
Training consisted of a brief demo and an e-mail message sent out to all employees, describing the dashboards and including instructions on how to use the interactive capabilities. “The Office SharePoint Server 2007 dashboards are so simple to use that it only requires about 15 minutes of training to work with them,” says Allan.
Once the initial set of dashboards is made available to all employees, Zango wants to start creating more role-specific BI tools that go beyond departmental dashboards to subportals. For example, there would be a sales portal and subportals for various roles such as sales managers and account executives. “We want to build these subportals so that each employee can quickly see the metrics that are important to them, so they can do their jobs more effectively,” says Allan.
Benefits
By implementing a comprehensive BI solution based on Microsoft SQL Server 2005 and Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007, Zango is gaining more timely and actionable information that will help it make better decisions and address problems more quickly. In addition, the flexibility of this solution will make it easy for the firm to extend and refine the solution to meet its changing needs.
Provides Immediate Access
to Relevant Information
While Office SharePoint Server 2007 dashboards won’t replace all the Web reports, they will make it possible for people to subscribe to only the reports that they want.
In addition, the easy-to-use drill-down capabilities on the dashboards make it convenient for all employees to analyze data in more detail without requiring them to write queries or wait several minutes for the results. “For speed, we set up a routine that runs hourly to create a table of the most recent information so that when someone refreshes the page, the dashboard pulls data from that table and populates the page immediately,” says Allan. With immediate access to current information, sales people can respond to clients’ questions in near real time rather than having to call them back with the answers.
The ability to drill down into the dashboards will also help Zango discover potential problems before they go too far. For example, the top level of revenue at any given hour might not indicate a problem because some products are up and some are down. But drilling down into the ad campaign portfolio might show that one campaign isn’t pulling much of a response. The situation may be caused by a technical problem that the advertiser is unaware of. “By alerting the advertiser to the problem within the hour, we might save thousands of dollars in lost advertising revenue,” says Allan. “Before, it might have taken a day to figure out that there was a problem because the overall revenue looked fine. But once we have our BI roadmap fully implemented, we’ll be able to use the alerting in Office SharePoint Server 2007 to inform the right people immediately.”
Helps Turn Information into Action
Although Zango was already collecting a wealth of useful data in its SQL Server database, the volume and length of reports made it very time-consuming for Zango employees to find the information that was relevant to them. “Once people saw reports a few times that didn’t have much value to them, many of them stopped reading them,” says Allan.
With the Office SharePoint Server 2007 dashboards and the eventual deployment of interactive portals designed for each business unit, Zango managers will have trending information related to their part of the business and will be able to drill down further to get a more specific view of what is going on. They can then use this information to more effectively manage their staff and address issues before they become problems.
“We run our business hour by hour, and with the alerting and drill-down capacity in the Office SharePoint Server 2007 dashboards, our people won’t have to notice something wrong; they will be alerted to potential problems and guided down a path to solve them, which will definitely enhance our retention of advertisers,” says Allan. “Using the Microsoft BI software to centrally communicate more actionable information to employees in the form of the KPIs that we think are important will help drive productivity and profitability.”
Extends Solution to Address
New Requirements
By using the built-in Web Parts in Office SharePoint Server 2007 to create additional dashboards, Zango will be able to easily extend the BI solution created by Habañero to address new requirements as time goes on. This will make it easier for Zango to realize its goal of building role-specific portals where each employee in each department will be able to tailor his or her view to focus on the KPIs that are important to his or her job.
“We’ll be able to take advantage of the flexibility of Office SharePoint Server 2007 to provide all of our employees—executive management, sales representatives, AP clerks, and IT technicians—with a home portal where they can easily monitor the metrics that are important to them,” says Allan.
Microsoft Office System
The Microsoft Office system is the business world’s chosen environment for information work, providing the programs, servers, and services that help you succeed by transforming information into impact.
For more information about the Microsoft Office system, go to:
office
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“Since the SQL Server 2005 database was already there, we didn’t have to create any new measures or record new information; all we did was write stored proce-dures and queries to populate the dash-boards, and Habañero did the rest.”
Tom Allan, Director of Finance, Zango
| |
“Using the Microsoft BI software to centrally communicate more actionable information to employees in the form of the KPIs that we think are important will help drive productivity and profitability.”
Tom Allan, Director of Finance, Zango
| |
| |Software and Services
Microsoft Office
Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007
Microsoft Server Product Portfolio
Microsoft SQL Server 2005
Technologies
Web Parts
SQL Server 2005 Reporting Services
Excel Services
|Partner
Habañero Consulting Group | |
This case study is for informational purposes only. MICROSOFT MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, IN THIS SUMMARY.
Document published August 2008 | | |
For More Information
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For more information about Habañero products and services, call (866) 841-6201 in the United States or (604) 709-6201 in Canada, or visit the Web site at:
For more information about Zango products and services, call (425) 279 - 1200 or visit the Web site at:
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