Customer & Partner Solution Brief
/ / Yell Uses Agility Quotient to Benchmark Capabilities and Analyse Opportunities
“The use of the Agility Quotient tool helped confirm the progress IS has made towards achieving our agility goals and also identified further investment opportunities.”
Phil Ives, Head of Information Services, Yell
Business and Technology Goals
Yell, a leading international directories business, is committed to continuous improvement to maintain its leadership. Agile organisations tend to have improved sector performance based on market share, profitability, competitive advantage, and innovation. Yell’s CIO was looking for a tool to measure the company’s agility. The challenge for Yell was to assess the following:
Ability to adapt to effectively meet changing market/customer conditions.
Agility benchmarked against the industry.
Performance in three core areas—sales, marketing, and customer service.
Realisation of value from the deployment and use of technology.
Capability of the company’s IS technologies to meet future business needs.
Solution
In December 2003, Yell learned that Microsoft had developed with Gartner an Agility Quotient tool that would enable Yell to meet the above business needs.
The study enabled Microsoft® Services to apply the Agility Quotient (AQ) tool to pinpoint issues in the business units and to generate aligned recommendations. The AQ measured and assessed:
Yell’s ability and efficiency to sense and respond to environmental change.
Yell’s business agility against a benchmark model, which is now operating with a growing pool of about 100 international companies.
Benefits
The assignment gave Yell an opportunity to answer its questions about business agility and performance and also demonstrated the value Microsoft could offer to Yell beyond desktop-based solutions. It highlighted the following:
Yell’s ongoing, strong commitment to invest in technology and the management support structures. It identified opportunities forgreater integration and exploitation.
Yell’s performance in three core areas (sales, marketing and customer service) and offered tailored recommendations.For example, in Customer Services, there was a need to capture richer customer data with wider visibility and ease of navigation.
Yell’s considerably higher agility performance than benchmarked companies and a strong fit with use of existing technology.It also recommended the enhanced use of specific business-aligned IS capabilities.
The next steps are for Yell and Microsoft to build on this engagement with a future joint exploration of opportunities, including the benefits of collaboration technologies aligned to Yell’s agility goals.
© 2005 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved. This solution brief is for informational purposes only. MICROSOFT MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, IN THIS SUMMARY. Microsoft is a registered trademark of Microsoft Corporation in the United States and/or other countries. All other trademarks are property of their respective owners.Document published January 2006