Bringing order to disparate data

How Informa unlocked the full potential of its valuable data

Informa’s Business Intelligence division provides in-depth data and insight to customers in several key industry verticals – helping them to make more strategic and better-informed decisions.

As a result of a series of mergers and acquisitions, the data held by its Agribusiness Intelligence business had become difficult to access, and generating customer reports was time-consuming and unwieldy.

Informa asked Equal Experts to help organise thousands of disparate data items into a new digital platform, accessed via a new customer portal.

Now, with automated data ingestion into the new platform, the team has more time to focus on other things. And with a renewed customer experience, the declining trend in subscription renewals has been reversed. In fact, subscription renewal is higher than it has ever been, with 12-month renewal rates approaching 90%.

Customer feedback has been overwhelmingly positive too, with Advanced Bioenergy declaring the platform and reporting “1,000 times better than before”.

Outcomes

130%

increase in weekly page views

700%

increase in data download

About Informa

Informa PLC is a British multinational publishing, business intelligence, and exhibitions group. Headquartered in London, it has offices in 43 countries. Listed on the London Stock Exchange and the FTSE 100, it has a large business intelligence offering, with sectors including agribusiness, finance and pharmaceuticals.

Industry

Software and technology

Organisation size

11,000 employees, £2.9b turnover

Location

Global, with London headquarters

Challenge

Difficult to manage data

Informa’s Agribusiness Intelligence division covers agricultural industries and provides in-depth data and insight to customers – helping them to make more strategic, and better-informed decisions.

After a number of mergers and acquisitions, and the integration of new brands, it became increasingly difficult to manage data efficiently. Various legacy processes were also creating inconsistency and duplication.

Reports were also an issue. Supplied to customers in an outdated PDF format, they required a huge amount of manual work, especially as they could run to many hundreds of pages.

Agribusiness Intelligence saw an opportunity to address its own processes to better manage, access and use its valuable data, and improve the end products to customers.

Solution

Making data more valuable – through restructuring and consistency

Informa asked Equal Experts to help them organise thousands of disparate data items into a new digital platform, accessed via a new customer portal, known as IEG Vantage.

Starting with an initial two-week inception, Equal Experts examined more than 40 years worth of Informa data, products and deliverables. It quickly became apparent that it was impossible to bring everything online in 6 months. Instead we needed to focus on delivering the best possible value, by focusing efforts on the part of the business which had the most revenue at risk.

Once this was decided, we started delivering usable content in an online format, validating with customers as we worked.

By restructuring the source data, which was spread across thousands of spreadsheets, we could post to the new platform in a consistent manner. This also helped transform the customer experience, making it easier to search and filter sets of data, and access more digestible custom charts and tables.

Saving time through automated delivery

Now came the real innovation. The Informa team was now able to automate the ingestion of data into the new platform, including the creation of metadata to describe different information points.

This meant a mammoth migration task became achievable. It also allowed ingested data, which had previously been far less accessible, to be found and used more effectively.

This data was now directly at the customers’ fingertips, providing IEG Vantage customers with detailed, tailored business reports. Enormous and unwieldy PDF reports, some of which extended to 3,000 pages, are now a thing of the past, with a new customer portal offering a much more dynamic service. By featuring the latest market updates, downloads, and interactive charts, they make full use of the breadth of data held by Informa.

Results

Unlocking the full potential of data, and increasing customer satisfaction

For the first time, Agribusiness Intelligence’s insight has unlocked the full potential for its IEG Vantage customers.

The enhanced customer experience has seen the declining trend in subscription renewals reversed. In fact, the division has seen higher subscription renewal rates than at any other point in its history, with 12-month renewal rates approaching 90%. Weekly page views are up by over 130%, with ensuing data downloads up by over 700%.

Customer feedback has been overwhelmingly positive, with Advanced Bioenergy declaring the platform and reports ‘1,000 times better than before’.