While most BI teams are shrinking, Ericsson’s Analytics team has grown to triple digits in the last five years, to bring the 5G evolution to life! If you’re not familiar with 5G, it’s the next generation of cellular network technology that is 100 times faster than 4G! Crazy I know!
I met Bjorn six years ago when Ericsson hired our team to help them create analytics to support the LTE evolution. As the Head of Automation and Analytics at Ericsson Networks, Bjorn Johansson shares his lessons learned from scaling up so quickly, his unique philosophy around analytics, and key tips to scale any BI team!
"Experience is a function of you running a lot of different things."
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3 Knowledge Bombs
- Bjorn on Team Building - Successful teams are made through diversification and focused support.
- Bjorn on How to Think - Asking the basic questions to get back to your "core" as a company, is fundamental to bringing your company into the profit zone and ability to grow.
- Bjorn on Storytelling - Storytelling is key to being able to share your material in an effective way, compelling way.
In this episode, you'll learn:
- [05:28] - Bjorn's background and growth with Ericsson.
- [08:55] - Key Quote: The cool thing about understanding statistics is that it's a common language across a lot of industries and different roles or careers. - Bjorn Johansson
- [12:37] - The surprising core business of Ericsson: It's not speakers!
- [14:43] - How to manage 40 - 100 tasks for over 50 - 60 thousand projects!
- [16:26] - What Bjorn and Ericsson are doing to prepare for the 5G revolution and why it matters.
- [17:44] - Utilizing data to simplify services, to do more work, faster.
- [20:08] - Key Quote: We need to be able to automate a lot of the work which people have been doing manually in the past, so they can do it faster and free up capacity. - Bjorn Johansson
- [25:24] - Moving from shared to a centralized organization.
- [26:46] - AHA Moment - Realizing the importance of investing in R&D even in difficult moments of downsizing and cost-cutting.
- [31:25] - Bjorn's "Football team" vision: moving from traditional, waterfall type development to full-blown Agile ways of working.
- [33:10] - Combating Large enterprise challenges.
- [35:27] - Key Quote: "What we focus on inside my team, is really about how we deliver our business to our customers." - Bjorn Johansson
- [36:48] - How Ericsson used "Hackathons" to find the real problems people are experiencing.
- [40:25] - Bjorn's 4 pieces of advice for approaching business solutions.
- [43:31] - Focusing on Storytelling.
- [47:14] - Bjorn's inspirations and recommended resources.
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"Sometimes the best idea, presented in a horrible way, is the differentiator."
Links and Resources mentioned in this episode:
- Read same resources that helped Bjorn...
- Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman
- Bjorn works at Ericsson Networks
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