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Customer Story

Xebia's Collaboration with RTS for Data-Driven Excellence

Xebia and RTS join forces to enhance media impact through an ethical data strategy, unlocking potential and fostering collaboration.
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Related Services
Snowplow, dbt, Snowflake, Power BI,  Amazon Web Services (AWS)

Industry
Technology | Telecom | Media

Company
Xebia

The Radio Télévision Suisse (RTS) is a prominent public broadcasting organization that holds a significant place in the media landscape of the French-speaking part of Switzerland, Romandy. With a rich history and diverse programming, RTS is at the forefront of delivering news, entertainment, and cultural programming to the Swiss audience. The organization's commitment to journalistic integrity, innovation, and cultural diversity has made it a trusted source of information and a vital platform for expressing Swiss identity. With its headquarters in Geneva and Lausanne, RTS continues shaping the media landscape in Switzerland and bringing high-quality content to all audiences nationwide. 
Why
Increased competition and digitization of the media industry raise new challenges.
What
RTS tasked Xebia with crafting a dynamic data strategy, sparking enthusiasm for data and its applications, and ensuring widespread adoption.
How
With RTS, Xebia led a 6-month project to define the company's goals, assess the current situation, prioritize use cases, and strategize for success.

Unlocking the Power of Data

As a well-established media, RTS holds information stored across various systems that serve many purposes, such as archiving, publication, digital marketing, and support functions. 

Through tens of interviews and thanks to the expertise of key people at RTS, Xebia drew a picture of the company’s data architecture and analytics landscape. This revealed rich pockets of data, skills, knowledge, and technology siloed across the organization. 

To unlock valuable data use cases, it became clear that RTS needed to break these silos from the following angles:

  • Data governance: Promote secure and responsible usage of data across the organization by setting a data governance program, including data lifecycle analyses and thorough compliance efforts
  • Technical foundation: Reinforce capabilities to build scalable analytics solutions, starting with the development of a User Data Platform to better understand and serve the public
  • Data democratization: Bridge the gap between data teams and domains to ensure the development of relevant use cases and their adoption by the business
  • Empowered people: Foster knowledge sharing and personal development among data professionals and toward the business
  • Data as a common tool and language: Demystify data and analytics and stimulate collaboration across domains

At the Forefront of the Ethical Use of Data

Throughout the data strategy project, Xebia conducted workshops with all domains at RTS and collected tens of use case ideas. After refinement, four themes emerged:

  • Supporting impactful journalism: Data allows us to understand various user needs better and inform content creation accordingly. Artificial Intelligence can also help reduce repetitive tasks, such as transcription or translation, and search large volumes of archived content.
  • Increasing reach: Serving and reaching all segments of the Swiss population is at the heart of RTS's mission. By measuring the performance of content among its audiences, RTS can adapt its marketing and distribution efforts to address the right people with the right content.
  • Enabling effective company steering: RTS has a responsibility to the public to ensure the efficient allocation of its resources across its content portfolio. 
  • Encouraging cross-domain collaboration: By democratizing data, RTS can increase transparency and collaboration across the organization.

As a public service media, RTS has a particular responsibility to its public to ensure the ethical use of data. Therefore, one of the pillars of the data strategy is to ensure that data is well governed and that the ethical dimensions of a use case are collectively overseen.

Enhanced Data Collection and Utilization

"Xebia not only met but anticipated the challenges of our project, playing a crucial role in its success within our company. The ability to understand and integrate the specific challenges of our sector was the key to our joint progress.”
radio-television-suisse-rts-vector-logo
Natalia Paredes Head of Publics & Platforms, Digital Unit

Rolling out the Data Strategy

The data strategy draws the steps and guiding principles towards the North Star. To achieve its ambitions and show results fast, RTS immediately focused its efforts on execution. With the help of Xebia’s analytics engineers, translators, and strategists, RTS successfully executed the first steps of its data strategy plans:

  • An organization-wide effort was put into getting a thorough understanding of RTS processes and data flows and establishing data governance
  • Within six months, RTS built a data platform that collects behavioral data with fine-grained consent management and full ownership of the raw data.
  • The engineering and analytics teams were reinforced and upskilled to support the execution of new use cases – including hiring and passing the Analytics Translator certification.
  • A framework for analytics translation was defined to collect and prioritize use cases systematically while ensuring adoption by business stakeholders.

In less than a year, RTS has profoundly changed how it collects, manages, and uses technical and organizational data. Thanks to its new Customer Data Platform and upgraded capabilities, RTS has launched its first use cases to support delivering relevant news to the Swiss public and expanding its digital footprint.

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