How Red Olive helped the telecoms industry and local government attract international investment
Red Olive worked with a telecoms body that represents over 500 global telecoms firms. It advises them of best practice and counsels heads of government on the spectrum, coverage, bandwidth and due diligence. Without it, we’d find it far harder to use our mobile phones overseas and the market as a whole would be starved of investment.
Because of this the group gathers enormous amounts of data and employs a team of PhD statisticians to make sense of it and inform policy recommendations to governments around the world. Yet, when it came to presenting that data to its members and target audience, it looked to work with an external organisation with experience in conveying meaning intuitively.
From Raw Data To Meaningful Message
“The group had an internal proof of concept for ranking all of the major countries for which it has data,” says Red Olive Senior Consultant, Alex Edwards. “If it could convey that ranking clearly, it could show each territory how it compares with its neighbours and those with similar traits elsewhere for funding and investment, and how changing some of its national policies could help it improve its performance.”
Red Olive works with some of the biggest names in business and helps them to interpret and present precisely this kind of high-level information, so it was a natural choice to bring this concept to life.
“Our deadline was just two weeks,” Alex explains. “The world’s biggest annual telecommunications conference, Mobile World Congress, was approaching, and our client wanted to demonstrate the concept on stage.”
Red Olive first identified the most compelling stats from previous data and spotted relevant patterns to prove the concept. With those in hand, it built a dashboard that would simulate the finished product, visualising each of the metrics in an intuitive manner.
“We took the output from the group’s index and converted it into graphics. We used geospatial maps and other visualisations and restructured the countries’ data to verify the visualisation was working correctly. It gave the delegates a clear idea of what the index was telling them – and how it could help them understand their own situation.”
Alex and the team at Red Olive used Tableau to communicate the key messages boldly. The results were unique, but the visualisation process itself is one that Red Olive has used with many clients.
From Concept To Product
Successfully demonstrating the proof of concept gave the group the clarity it needed to further refine the dashboard into a finished product. Following Mobile World Congress, this would be used by the client’s consultants in face-to-face meetings with senior business leaders and senior government officials around the world – so the solution needed to be robust and portable.
“It would show each country which changes they could make to their regulatory frameworks to make them more appealing,” Alex continues. “The goal would be to help them attract wider international investment by ensuring that they have in place the right infrastructure to make it easy for modern, internet-based and technology companies to do business in that country. By achieving this, they’re naturally making their own internal market more attractive to the group’s members, so everyone wins.”
Once it had completed the first tranche of work – drawing out the data into meaningful graphics – Red Olive spent two sessions training staff at the group’s offices, so they could further tweak the dashboard themselves.
“We understood the objectives, drivers and outcomes of the project, and how the data had been put together, and we applied all of that, so we could work collaboratively with the client. The outcome was visually very impressive.”
And, says Alex, it’s adaptable, too. “We can take any data and recommend the best tool for drawing out its full value. Whoever the client, whatever the source, we can help them visualise the data in an accessible, unambiguous manner – and quickly too.”
Unlock the value in the data you hold by talking to the experts at Red Olive today. Call 01256 831100 or email [email protected]