Deloitte and Multichoice partner to harness data insights

Deloitte started their journey with South Africa’s Multichoice in September 2019, with a shared vision around making Multichoice a data, analytics and insight-driven organisation. With a cloud based data and analytics platform and innovations such as warehouse automation, they are achieving things in the pay TV space that are world leading. 

Ryan Norris and Quentin Williams are two of the Deloitte Africa Analytics leaders. Together, they work with Debra Goosen, Lead: Analytics Innovation at Multichoice, who sets the vision and course of the current programme, as well as ensuring execution against the enterprise data strategy.

Norris’s role entails working alongside Goosen and the Multichoice team as Engagement Delivery Director, making sure that Deloitte brings value from a business perspective and for the overall programme delivery.

Deloitte and Multichoice join forces with the Vibranium Programme

The idea behind Vibranium originates from Marvel’s Black Panther. Much like Wakanda is a city of scientific advancement, Vibranium symbolises the powerful insights that data (the Vibranium ore) can provide, in terms of getting closer to the customer and their needs.

Williams adds: “Deloitte is on the journey with Multichoice, we had to look at the process and the approach, ensuring that every aspect of Vibranium is value-driven, not just insight-driven.”

Goosen reveals that the programme is built around evolving business value realisation: “It is an important aspect to continuously improve, in terms of your delivery and velocity within each of the squads, but with more of the focus around outcomes.”

Norris remarks: “We have a shared culture and ethos, so we clicked right from the beginning. From our first kick-off session, we jointly sketched out what this programme was going to look like in the end.”

The autonomy to be innovative, within the guardrails of governance​​​​​​​

Goosen considers it quite a feat to achieve this balance: “I think we are in a good place in terms of getting that balance between governance versus autonomy. What we've established is an architecture community in order to set up those guardrails, and an important component or construct of that is that there are representatives from across the data and analytics community that engage and participate in that architecture community forum, which means it's not a dictatorship, but a completely collaborative co-creation. We define those guardrails and what is reasonable, managing effectively in a cohesive and appropriate manner, while still allowing the teams to be innovative and deliver at the required speed for the business.”

According to Norris, Multichoice has the desire to be the best and to harness the power of data: “We looked at things holistically; from data management, choosing the right technology, business intelligence, and advanced analytics to machine learning, automating the right pipelines and how to use data in a responsible manner.”

“It's one of the largest programmes from an analytics perspective, with 140+ analysts within Multichoice, from data engineers and data scientists to principal business analysts and scrum masters. It's fantastic to work on that scale,” says Norris.

Williams reveals that it is possible to get the best of both worlds: “Excellence and flexibility can actually go hand-in-hand. They're not mutually exclusive. You can be agile and still deliver excellent outcomes.”

READ THE FULL MULTICHOICE REPORT HERE