Capgemini Super Techies Show Season 3 - The New York Times Challenge

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Capgemini Super Techies Show Season 3- NYT Challenge
Copyright © Capgemini 2014. All Rights Reserved 2
The Facts
 Founded in 1861, the New York Times (NYT) is the most trusted and respected
source of news in the world
 No longer solely a newspaper company, NYT now has a significant, global digital
presence
 The worldwide print circulation of the NYT, including that of the International New
York Times, is commendably high as is their digital reach on the web and mobile
 Like many companies in the midst of a digital transformation, NYT’s business
information is spread across a disparate collection of systems—from aging
mainframes to cloud-based <please insert appropriate term here>

Background on Challenge
 The New York Times is committed to becoming a data-driven organization
 To use, re-use, exploit and govern their many data assets, NYT must rationalize
them
 Rationalization includes establishing relationships between metadata across
systems
 To establish these relationships, NYT should first be able to locate their metadata
Metadata collation requires consistent nomenclature, applied within a centralized
system

Background on Challenge – Situation Analysis
 This challenge represents a real business problem for the New York Times
 Thus, NYT focuses the Capgemini Super Techies challenge on advertising
systems and workflow with emphasis on sales pipeline management, forecasting,
order entry and billing
 Forecasting is currently an extremely manual process involving continual
communication between sales reps and sales management
 Historical information, which is used to validate forecasts and create year-over-year
comparisons, resides in separate international and domestic (US) systems
for both print and digital
 Actual business results, required to update forecasts on a monthly basis, are
contained in a separate financial system

Background on Challenge – Situation Analysis
 Forecasts must be able to segment the business by industry category and region,
beginning at the individual-account level
 Accounts may be agencies or clients or both; there is no fixed nomenclature for
either
 Accounts are assigned to one or more sales persons in order to determine
commissions; revenue per account is assigned proportionally if multiple sales
persons are involved
 There is no consistent taxonomy within and between legacy systems for naming
accounts or agencies; in essence, people manually normalize the data between
these legacy systems

The Problem
The current system for forecasting and reporting advertising sales revenue
is inefficient and time-consuming as it relies heavily on manual processes
and legacy systems
Transformation to an automated system is desirable but requires a
consistent taxonomy to rationalize the metadata within and between
systems

The Challenge Statement
Suggest a solution that allows the New York Times to effectively automate
advertising sales forecasting
Use technology to normalize the metadata within print and digital legacy
systems and create a unified workflow that can be applied to historical data
and scales to all future data needs

The Challenge Statement - Details
 The system should be resilient to data scarcity and be smart enough to identify
fields where manual input is desirable
Mapping should be a supervised automated process that incorporates machine
learning to achieve scale
 Solution should include a method for adapting internal taxonomies to achieve
more granular metadata
 Solution must allow for the introduction of new metadata

Important Points to Remember
 Data reconciliation need only go back 10 years in time, with special importance
placed on making sure that client accounts and affiliated data are normalized
 Any external taxonomies that we can be borrowed from or adopted should be
identified and incorporated into the solution where applicable
 The business process suggested as a solution to this challenge should be
adaptable to comparable business challenges throughout NYT (for example,
metadata associated with their published news stories)

General Pointers
• Time allotted for solution presentation: Teams will be given 20 minutes for a
detailed presentation to judges (off-camera) and 3 minutes for a high-level pitch (on-camera)
• Mentor consultation:
- Call: Teams will have access to a 30-min audio call with a Capgemini expert; the
teams are expected to keep questions ready for the call in advance
- Email: Additionally, teams can send one email with questions to the expert anytime
before the final solution submission
Tip: Mentors will take at least 48 hours to revert; therefore, the earlier the questions
are sent, the better
• CXO interaction:
- Call: All teams will get to be part of a 30–45 min audio call with the CXO of NYT;
during the call, teams can direct questions pertaining to the challenge to the CXO
- Date and time of the call: To be confirmed

www.capgemini.com
The information contained in this presentation is proprietary.
© 2014 Capgemini. All rights reserved. Rightshore® is a trademark belonging to Capgemini.
About Capgemini
With more than 130,000 people in over 40 countries, Capgemini
is one of the world's foremost providers of consulting, technology
and outsourcing services. The Group reported 2013 global
revenues of EUR 10.1 billion.
Together with its clients, Capgemini creates and delivers
business and technology solutions that fit their needs and drive
the results they want. A deeply multicultural organization,
Capgemini has developed its own way of working, the
Collaborative Business ExperienceTM, and draws on Rightshore ®,
its worldwide delivery model.

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Capgemini Super Techies Show Season 3 - The New York Times Challenge