Covering Disruptive Technology Powering Business in The Digital Age

“The RTBF started its Big Data project in 2015 with one precise goal: recommending the right content to the right people, at the right time and in the right format.

Working with start-up companies has helped us progress faster and overcome a number of challenges on our path to innovation. They provide us the right amount of innovation, boldness and flexibility we need to succeed. A Big Data project is indeed not like any other IT project. It is iterative and difficult to plan. Flexibility is an essential quality to test solutions quickly and learn from failures. However it is only rarely found in bigger organizations.

Another key quality of startups is their willingness to test their technology and have user cases they can show to other prospective clients. This need to assess their own work leads startups to often carry out tests for free or for little money. This in turn allows us, at RTBF, to quickly test several technologies in parallel and to retain only the best one.

The picture I’m drawing may seem excessively beneficial to the RTBF but in fact it’s also very beneficial to start-ups. Beyond building credibility through true use cases, startups benefit from our collaborative approach: we always try help them improve their products.

The most successful example we can report on is of a Brussels-based startup that we met in early 2015 with an immature technology to analyze Facebook audiences. We accompanied the team to build an interactive product meeting the needs of broadcasters but also of other firms.

After a year of development the product is now available on the market, fully mature, and has in the meantime been used by several departments at RTBF to fulfil market research needs. In particular this tool was used to analyze users’ profiles and expectations for a new 100%-digital media we will be launching in 2017 for the 12-25 segment.”

Key learning points:

• The very nature of a Big Data project requires an iterative approach : start with small-scale implementations, test, improve, and enlarge progressively to the whole organization.
• Flexibility is in start-ups’ DNA and can be used to successfully achieve your Big Data strategy.
• Start-ups are interested in assessing their technology on real business cases : providing them with a real business environment will often allow you to get an amazing deal for conducting a significant test.
• Take a collaborative approach and make sure the start-up learns as much as you do when carrying out the test. Take time to help them improve : this is in both parties’ interest.

This article was originally published on www.ebu.com and can be viewed in full

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