LTV at LTC

I've written quite a bit about unsuccessful Information Engineering projects; now I want to write about a successful one.

How can you change a company? Give people the information they need to make decisions they never thought they could and that changes how they think about the enterprise. The trouble is, any organization will put up a lot of resistance to change.

In 2002 I managed a Life-Time Value (LTV) project at a Large Telecommunications Company (LTC) that did change the enterprise. LTV is an attempt to measure the overall economic impact of each customer to the enterprise over their expected life. Ideally this is concrete numeric data so we can ask “Is this customer worth $300 in new equipment for them if they will stay with us for two more years”?

The LTV project allowed people to think about the business in new ways, the project was embraced by the Chief Marketing Officer, and the project saved $15 million each year in direct marketing costs while adding to the revenue from marketing programs simply by not spending money to retain customers that LTC was losing money on.

There are a lot of articles about how to do LTV calculations. This time I want to talk about all the corporate politics around sheparding the LTV project to success.