From cost center to value provider: How TELUS’ IT teams use Google Cloud to boost revenue

Featured in this video:
Stephen Lee, Head of Enterprise Data Engineering at TELUS

Executive summary:
Aside from supporting more than 20 million customer telecommunications connections across Canada, TELUS operates in 32 countries through its Digital, Health, and Agriculture business units. But to conduct these large-scale operations, the TELUS teams need to quickly and securely access and collaborate on accurate data. The company used to work in silos, leveraging multiple on-premises data centers which resulted in unreliable, duplicate information in its data lakes. A migration to Google Cloud brought TELUS’ teams closer together with one source of truth and helped reach its goal to generate millions of dollars through smarter use of data insights and self-serve AI.

Challenge:
In November 2021, TELUS lacked a solid data foundation to drive analytics and AI at scale across the company. At the time, several teams relied on on-premises services and created their own data silos. The company also had two large on-premises data platforms and a High-Performance Business Intelligence relational database, but teams lacked a unified data governance strategy. The result was duplicate data across multiple platforms and a lot of confusion. TELUS needed a single source of truth to use its data efficiently and drive real business outcomes. Reliability concerns and the cost of maintenance of these disparate solutions led the TELUS team to seek an alternative, and that’s when it found Google Cloud.

Solution:
Since then, TELUS has modernized its infrastructure by adopting BigQuery as its enterprise data hub with self-serve analytics. The migration entailed connecting 6,000 dags, more than 200 data pipelines, and up to 14 Petabytes of structured customer information stored across 100 different source systems into BigQuery. TELUS teams now have a more reliable source of information in a fast and secure work environment.

Result:
Instead of a lift-and-shift migration, TELUS used the momentum to strategically clean and organize its data, removing 30% of its data sets because they weren’t generating business value, saving on storage costs. This strategy resonates across the company, with every TELUS employee encouraged to use data and analytics to drive innovation for real business sale power, whether it’s driving top-line revenue or leading cost efficiency and savings on the bottom line. In this way, TELUS is changing the narrative: from traditional IT technologies being considered a cost center to becoming a value generation center through data enablement and self-serve AI capabilities in BigQuery. The company’s recent annual goal was to generate $150 million through data enablement and AI to support the business, both on consumer retail and B2B technology networks.

Next, with the foundation of its enterprise data well established on BigQuery, TELUS is driving more adoption of generative AI across the entire organization. The idea is to support and streamline every single process with close- and open-source models for different use cases across TELUS’ Health, Digital, and Agriculture, maturing and elevating the data strategy of these business units with Google Cloud.

Highlights and key takeaways
→ “Small steps lead to big things. The first step was to centralize data and go from on-premises databases to the cloud. Then it is about making sure that we’re not just adopting the latest and greatest technology from Google just for the sake of doing so; it has to be tied to real business outcomes.” – Stephen Lee, Head of Enterprise Data Engineering at TELUS

→ “We looked at our migration to BigQuery as a people-process-technology enablement program. Our idea was to modernize everything from end to end, connecting the source system to BigQuery, to our users, to the CRM systems, to the sales team, to ultimately customer outreach, prospect, and conversion.” – Stephen Lee, Head of Enterprise Data Engineering at TELUS

→ “We’re trying to change the narrative from IT technology being a cost center to being a value provider. The goal was to generate $150 million through data enablement and AI to support our business. So we’re really pushing to drive more adoption of generative AI across the organization” – Stephen Lee, Head of Enterprise Data Engineering at TELUS

Google Cloud products used: BigQuery