Data Warehouse Architect Enables Business Growth

Leveraging Appropriate Data Warehouse Architecture Ensures Better Support for Business Growth: Leadership at a local Seattle non-profit better understands the capabilities of their data warehouse platform and has the vision for extending it to provide more meaningful analytics

Challenge

After a significant data warehouse platform relaunch, a local non-profit needed a comprehensive understanding of their system’s Business Intelligence capabilities and a roadmap for delivering increased value. The BI implementation had not been documented, and there was limited understanding of how the BI platform should integrate into the overall technology ecosystem and business processes.

Approach

Plaster Group’s Data and Analytics Consultants met with stakeholders to review their business goals, and then held discovery sessions with key users to understand the challenges of the current system. With this background they led the customer through a detailed assessment of their core BI systems and provided guidance for short- and long-term planning

Solution

Leveraging their data warehouse architecture experience combined with structured modeling processes and documentation tools, Plaster Group consultants led the development of an architecture framework that mapped platform capabilities with business objectives. Deliverables included:

  • A detailed plan for short-term platform stabilization and transition.
  • Documentation (“as built”) for the previously deployed data warehouse system.
  • Mentoring on industry standards and best practices, tailored to the customer’s specific environment.
  • A BI/DW roadmap with both immediate changes and incremental future improvements for advancing the data warehouse capabilities to support business growth while remaining in sync with their broader technology direction.

Results

Business users noticed immediate benefits from the stability and performance improvements. More significantly, with a better understanding of their data warehouse architecture and its capabilities the DW leadership team can more effectively align the BI/DW roadmap with current and emerging current business objectives.