Christophe Lemaire, CIO at Eurostar spoke at the CIO Event, March 2013

1. Eurostar’s take on
Business Intelligence and
information exploitation
strategy
Christophe Lemaire
CIO, Eurostar

2. Content
● Context and Background
● Our current situation
● How did we approach the subject?
● Who did we consult?
● Solution Framework
● What challenges are we faced with?
● Q&As
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3. Leading companies are increasingly using data as
a key enabler to improve their performance
“The flood of data and analytical opportunities creates more value for those who can be creative in
seeing the patterns and ... creating new business opportunities that take advantages of those patterns”
Erik Brynjolfsson, Director of MIT centre of Digital Business
■The volume of available data are increasing significantly, with IDC
estimating that the amount of data managed by enterprises will grow by
over 50 times in 10 years.
■Business Intelligence is increasingly becoming a priority for investment,
with Forrester reporting that it has become the top priority in companies’
implementation plans.
■Companies are re-organising their operating models in a way to ensure
they can optimise their use of data
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4. Our business suffers from insufficient and
inconsistent information
►We currently lack the ability to identify most of our individual customers, limiting
how we can understand them and their needs
►We cannot get a single view of all our customer interactions, meaning we fail to
Lack of single
leverage the breadth and depth of customer data that we already possess
customer view
►Need of a single customer view and customer specific insight, in
order to personalise our service and product based on customer
value
►We have multiple systems that report revenue, but their aggregation still
requires too much manual processing
Poor visibility of ►We cannot provide full revenue assurance and we do rely on third parties to
bookings and revenue provide figures on sales and travelled revenue
►We do not have visibility of provisional / unticketed bookings, so
we cannot ensure proper revenue integrity
►Our existing reporting landscape is complex and heterogeneous, making
reporting tasks time consuming and not flexible
Limited ability to ►We have little ability to efficiently combine data coming from
produce insight different systems (silos) into a single, trusted repository
►We limited capability for analysis of the data we do have access to, such as
visualisation, drill-down and predictive analytics
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5. We sought external expertise to help us
approach this issue in a methodical way
Develop
Identify Analyse Customer
Custom
Customer er
Customer Insight use cases
Insight study Insight use and evaluate their
Insight
cases value to Eurostar
vision
Understand BI
current state Design BI solution
Business Generate
blueprint and test
BI
Intelligence with System
business
study Integrators and
Elicit requirements case
product vendors
for Enterprise BI
across the business
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6. All areas of our business have contributed to
the requirements for a BI solution
•The degree of
complexity of guiding approach
Principles Business areas covered
requirements will
differ across the Business Area Depth of analysis
business, with some
areas having more Detailed analysis of use cases
complex needs than to meet business objectives
Customer Insight and strategies for customer
others. insight (main contributor to
business case)
•This study focused
on the business Finance
areas with more Fraud Prevention Analysis of reporting and
analytics requirements
complex needs Revenue Optimisation
•The study had to
cope with Business Planning
heterogeneous levels Strategy
of detail in the
Stations
requirements Gap assessment between
existing capabilities and stated
expressed by the Sales
requirements
business Eurostar Contact Centre
Human Resources
•The requirements
provided at this early Rolling Stock
stage have been
used to design a
blueprint of the 6

7. We have proposed a BI solution that will serve
the needs of the wider organisation in E*
Summary view of solution blueprint developed by our BI study
Main data Enterprise BI Solution
sources
Booking Data Information Information
systems transformation repository delivery
Customer
profiles Data Transactional Dash-
Reports
integration data boards
Loyalty
systems Data
ingestion ‘Slice and
Predictive
Payment Data quality Reference data dice’
analytics
systems analysis
Operations &
Rolling Stock 360° view Ad hoc
Others Others
of customer queries
Reference
data
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8. The challenges we are facing at the moment
before starting the project
Very tricky to decide on the scope of the project:
BI can provide benefits to all departments, however pragmatic decisions
have to be made on what the appropriate scope is in order to keep it
under control. Prioritisation criteria can be: departmental readiness,
business value, complexity, …
Lack of common understanding and definition of BI:
Every area of our business have their own preconceived ideas about the
meaning of BI and what the project is trying to achieve. It is still our
biggest challenge!
Identifying the appropriate business sponsor:
Finding the appropriate sponsor for this project was another major hurdle,
which took a while to iron out. Our project is likely to be jointly sponsored
by the commercial director and the CFO.
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9. Two additional key messages to have in mind when
embarking on a BI project
1. A BI project can only “fly” if put into the context of an
overall Information Systems Strategy & Roadmap
2. A BI project will generally not solve quality issues of
input data: “Garbage in, garbage out”
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10. Any Questions ?

11. Thank you !