GCI: strengthening communications networks across Alaska with IBM planning and analytics.

The challenge

Ensuring that network infrastructure can keep pace with new developments in technology is a challenge shared by all communications companies. Major network upgrades involve enormous investments of capital and human resources, and delivering an infrastructure that is not only cost-effective to build but also affordable to maintain over its whole lifetime is a complex challenge for business-planning teams.

At GCI, one of Alaska's leading communications companies, these challenges are made even more severe by having to deliver large-scale projects in extremely difficult conditions with limited state resources. Alaska is the largest state in the U.S. at 1.06 million square miles, yet the least densely populated, with just 1.2 inhabitants per square mile — a sparse distribution that poses real logistical challenges as GCI grows its networks. The company's capital decisions are also shaped more by the health of an Alaskan economy dominated by oil, gas and fishing — where tax revenue is declining as oil fields deplete and regulation limits expansion — than by the activities of its competitors.

“The ‘Alaska factor’ makes delivering capital projects and meeting Federal Communications Commission mandates that little bit more complex,” says Alicia Schwamm, Senior Manager, Capital Control & Management at GCI. “Often we must deliver materials to our build-sites by boat or air, and on some occasions the presence of a moose or polar bear — or unexpected weather — can cost a day's work. To manage all these variables, we used to schedule and track projects using spreadsheets that changed hands many times. We ended up spending more time verifying the accuracy of that information than on the more important task of prioritizing our workload and monitoring scorecards.”

With a portfolio of numerous multi-million-dollar projects, each with asset lifespans of seven years or more, finance and operations teams struggled to see whether actual expenses were on track. This lack of visibility into project expenditure and resource allocation limited GCI's ability to redirect capital as needed.

The solution

After exploring a variety of analytics solutions on the market, GCI decided to implement IBM Cognos TM1, a business planning and analytics solution that allows project managers to collaborate on building investment schedules, analyzing data, and creating forecasts that simulate changing business landscapes.

Incede.ai, an IBM Business Partner that specializes in analytics and performance-management technologies, helped design and build a solution to suit GCI's needs. “The Incede.ai team understood our requirements precisely,” recalls Schwamm. “Together we engineered the architecture supporting TM1 to help us rapidly obtain and analyze the data, so that we could ask the right questions about how project expenditure develops over time.”

GCI also utilized the Microsoft Excel integration capabilities of IBM Cognos TM1 to transition away from admin-heavy planning processes, making it easy to transfer data between spreadsheets and the TM1 platform and enabling project managers to visualize data in Excel's familiar interface. “We saw great potential in the IBM platform to restructure our planning process and generate detailed long-term projections,” Schwamm explains. “Being able to engage multiple personnel in remote locations closed the gap between the boardroom and the build site, and gave us features to manage scorecards and monitor performance across departments.”

The results

By analyzing the trends of both current and previous infrastructure development projects, GCI can avoid repeating mistakes and ensure it repeats successes — accelerating time-to-market while simultaneously hitting targets set by project sponsors and government funding initiatives.

“The clarity yielded by the IBM platform has prompted us to re-think our planning strategies and look for savings by prioritizing our investments,” says Schwamm. “In the past, we often suspected there were disparities between our project plan and actual progress, but it was difficult to prove. Today we can quantify any variance instantly, which helps us take targeted action to close the gap. Our old manual processes meant I had a bunch of algorithms running through my brain trying to pull data together; now the whole process is automated, giving me more opportunities to focus on planning for the future.”

“With the IBM solution in place, we're now able to formulate investment plans that extend our vision reliably to a five-year horizon, and design project budgets and schedules that we can have confidence in, both financially and strategically. We can manage our whole portfolio of projects much more effectively, prioritizing and allocating resources as needed to optimize outcomes as the situation evolves.”

GCI plans to extend the solution to the cloud and adopt the latest features of IBM Planning Analytics for greater mobility, visualization and advanced statistical modeling. “We see this as a business solution — owned and managed by the capital group, not IT,” Schwamm concludes. “By bridging to the cloud, our IT team can focus on adding value to other projects while we manage our own tools and use them from anywhere in the world.”

About GCI

Headquartered in Alaska with additional locations in other U.S. states, GCI has worked for more than 35 years to deliver communication and technology services to some of the most remote communities and challenging conditions in North America. A pioneer in its field, GCI brings telemedicine and online-education capabilities to communities across the state and continues efforts to connect the Arctic globally, while providing strong services to consumer and business markets.