- Use Case
- 4 min reading time
Dr. Yvonne Avaro
The BI & Analytics Team
Our client is a leading insurance company in Switzerland. The insurance company's BI & Analytics team is organized as an agile product team. The product team members come from both IT and the business side. This combination of specialist expertise with data and IT knowledge forms the basis on which internal users and systems are supplied with data & information on a daily basis. The team is responsible for the company's central Enterprise Data Warehouse and creates analytical data products with added value for specialist users. In order to better support the business, particularly with questions relating to self-service BI (SSBI), and to generally promote the use of SSBI, a working group for SSBI was established within the team.
The project
The aim of the project, which the BI & Analytics team carried out in collaboration with s-peers AG between 2022 and 2024, was to significantly increase both the awareness of the SSBI services offered and their use within the company. To this end, an internal marketing and communication strategy tailored to the insurer's needs was developed and implemented, which addressed the challenges mentioned above.
The challenges
Self-service BI is a key component in putting the insurer's ambition to become a data-driven company into practice. The SSBI working group recognized early on that it is not enough to simply provide users with the appropriate tools and access to the data relevant to them. Rather, it also requires additional communication and marketing measures to lower barriers to entry and increase user acceptance. Specifically, this includes:
1. The development and expansion of data competence to enable employees to independently carry out even complex data analyses and correctly interpret the results.
2. Support with tool selection and training to ensure that the most suitable tool is used for the respective task and that it can be used competently.
3. Building a community to enable and promote exchange between groups with
different requirements (e.g. consumers and authors) and backgrounds (e.g. business and IT).
The marketing and communication strategy implemented with the help of s-peers AG has given the user acceptance of self-service BI a tremendous boost. By gathering detailed information about the different needs of our users and deriving four clear personas from this, we were able to plan and implement corresponding target group-oriented measures. As a result, the awareness of the services offered has increased, and the number of users and their intensity of use on our SSBI platform have increased significantly.
Solution
The marketing and communication strategy included a series
of attention-grabbing measures:
1. Developing a clear SSBI vision
The team formulated an inspiring vision (see Fig. 1): "We create the most active SSBI community by connecting our colleagues with each other and enabling them to work with data." This vision was communicated through various channels and kept visually present, e.g. through posters in the offices.
2. Establishing a unique visual identity
The theme of "space" was chosen as the central anchor point of visual communication.
This metaphor was intended to convey fascination, curiosity, and innovation, and to create a high recognition value. The association with space helped to emotionally charge and make more tangible the topic of SSBI, which
might otherwise be perceived as too technical.
3. Detailed target group analysis
Through extensive interviews and analyses, four personas (see Fig. 2) were defined to better understand the different needs and challenges of the users. These personas helped to develop tailored communication and training approaches.
4. Target group and user-oriented measures
The target group and user-oriented measures (see Fig. 3) were divided into three categories: Inform, Involve, and Enable. The intranet page of the BI & Analytics team plays an important role in Inform. It is the central communication hub and serves as a landing page for regular mailings to the individual user groups. Examples of Involve measures are the learning nugget videos and the community building via a Viva Engage channel. The Enable measures aimed to enable the insurer's employees to work better with the SSBI tools. Examples of this are the SAP Analysis for Office (AfO) and SAP Analytics Cloud training courses, as well as web-based training (WBT) on the subject of data competence.
Conclusion
SSBI Success Story: Growth, Engagement, and Outlook to 2025:
- The number of SSBI users has increased. The intensity of use on the SSBI platform SAP Analytics Cloud (SAC) has increased significantly, and there are more active SSBI users and a third more authors in SAC (see Fig. 4).
- An SSBI Community has emerged and grown significantly. Over 200 participants have attended the SSBI events.
- The BI & Analytics Team has gained internal recognition. This is reflected, among other things, in the significantly increased visitor numbers to the team's internal SharePoint page (see Fig. 4).
- In general, it can be said that the needs of the specialist users are better understood by IT and vice versa.
The goals for 2025 include:
- Expansion of community activities in the area of data competence.
- Transfer standard marketing activities into regular operations.
- Further increase business involvement through more intensive collaboration with the controller community.
