It’s no secret that organization-wide digital transformation is a massive undertaking that is never truly complete.
The most business-critical platforms and processes often get prioritized, while niche teams and specialized operations may be stuck with the status quo, even as the business transforms around them.
Stuck in the spreadsheet age
We recently encountered a scenario like this while working with a Fortune 100 known for innovation. Although the company is responsible for developing world-changing technology and digital experiences, its Public Affairs team was still operating with manual, outdated, and inefficient processes.
This team is tasked with sourcing and categorizing thousands of pieces of press from all of the business’s geographies. And this international business is discussed in the media a lot.
From press releases to product announcements, the team then uses this data to shape responses to media coverage, or “initiatives.” But stuck in spreadsheets, processes were messy, inconsistent, and difficult to manage.
The team was working with more than 50 external vendors, spending upwards of $4 million annually to collect and categorize press data. And with dozens of sub-teams spanning the globe, the methods for collection and categorization varied team-to-team, resulting in inconsistent data and duplicated effort, among other challenges.
To make matters worse, the Public Affairs team was drowning in spreadsheets. They relied on more than 10,000 spreadsheets of media data produced by external agencies, while also using approximately 300 separate spreadsheets just to manage all of the individual initiatives internally. With more than 600 employees in the Public Affairs organization, from analysts to C-Suite executives, there was no way to efficiently and holistically view or manage day-to-day operations across teams.
Instead, one employee’s full-time responsibility was managing and synthesizing these spreadsheets. Another director-level employee spent hours each Sunday producing a report for executives highlighting the organization’s top initiatives that week.
Something needed to change.
An opportunity to organize operations
Luckily, DEPT® was already creating a tool to aggregate and analyze online news articles, with a focus on helping the company understand how it’s perceived publicly. For the Public Affairs department, it was the perfect catalyst to bring them into the modern era.
With the goal of ditching the spreadsheets and streamlining operations, we built a custom web application designed to track news cycles and source news coverage. A central repository for all press with global coverage, this application now automates the work previously done by the team’s external vendors and replaces the need for multiple social listening and consumer intelligence tools, such as Brandwatch and BuzzSumo, by integrating capabilities that span the full spectrum of the organization’s use cases.
Using the application, the team now handles all of its response initiatives in one platform—hosting more than 19,000 initiatives and replacing thousands of individual spreadsheets. With global reporting in one spot, the Public Affairs organization has full visibility across all its internal teams. More than 400 employees, from analysts to executives, use the application.
Augmenting & accelerating with AI
Our goal for the application was to create a central hub for managing all coverage and initiatives. But as digital transformations go, the project didn’t end there. We entered the next phase, leveraging automation and AI to increase efficiencies.
The application automatically pulls in tens of thousands of custom-targeted news articles daily, integrating data from thousands of sources across the web. Important articles are automatically surfaced, and all articles are easily searchable and tagged to their corresponding initiatives. The app also curates customized data views for different user roles. Based on this data, the application produces automated reporting as well as weekly communication emails.
Not only does the application handle all article language translations for the Public Affairs team, but it also uses a custom pre-trained AI model for sentiment analysis as well as auto-summarizes articles—all to make the data as accessible and actionable as possible.
Altogether, the creation and implementation of this custom app have saved the Public Affairs organization approximately 90 FTE hours per week and millions of dollars in vendor fees per year.
It has streamlined operations across the 600+ team members and unified the team for faster, more strategic, and more cohesive news responses. And most importantly, it brought a deeply important team within the company to a modernized state that’s poised for continual digital transformation and innovation.