DIRECTV, A DIVISION OF AT&T
DirecTV is the second largest pay TV provider in the United States. They know their success rests on their best customers and work very hard to know who they are and what can be done to keep them happy.
I hired John to help me deploy QlikView at DirecTV, which included defining development standards and setting up direct connection to Teradata warehouse. He has a great ability to break down tasks, and collaborate cross-functionally that allows him to bring projects to completion in a timely manner. He is great to work with.
-- J. Dillon
Senior Director, Business Analytics
DirecTV
Move To QlikView
DirecTV's sophisticated Analytics division is constantly looking for ways to increase market share and retain customers. Their presentations were Excel spreadsheet based. I was brought in to help DirecTV Analytics move into interactivity using QlikView.
I studied many of DirecTV's existing spreadsheets to learn DirecTV's business processes and analytics calculations. Once I had done that, I could operate intelligently in interacting with their staff and in coming up with solutions to their needs.
The interactivity of QlikView meant we could combine previously separate spreadsheets into one dashboard. That then required that the Teradata data pulls for the different spreadsheets be merged into one pull. This was complicated by the fact that sometimes the different spreadsheets obtained the same information from different sources with subtly different data structures.
The amount of data imported from Teradata was very large. DirecTV had 20 million subscribers and each customer service call could generate 50 records. In addition, the connection to the mainframe was relatively slow. Downloading one day's data could take 20 minutes.
I designed a data load that would download each day's data and merge it with the prior downloads.
I worked closely with the Teradata system administrators to develop programming standards to ensure we did not overtax the mainframe during peak production time.
I created the original Teradata queries and the QlikView scripts to transform and merge the data.
I also created the standards for QlikView development. This mostly involved the look and feel of the dashboards so users used to Excel could transition easily. There were also some programming rules I put in place for complex situations that did not usually come up with dashboards.
I helped train DirecTV developers that were moving to QlikView.
The analysts were also all starting to move to QlikView and I helped them with any questions they might have. I also ensured that they understood the fundamental aspects of QlikView that set it apart.