Challenge
A leading nonprofit serving higher education needed a data warehouse and analytic capabilities to support industry research and internal business operations. Our client was looking for a cost-effective, extensible and scalable solution that could grow with the business. Specifically, the organization needed to address:
- The lack of software, infrastructure, and tools to support data warehousing and analytic needs
- Insufficient staff to manually deliver on internal and external requests for research and operational reporting metrics
- Disparate systems and sources of data, making it time consuming to retrieve the necessary data required to satisfy the needs of internal and external constituents
- A desire to shift toward a data-driven mindset throughout the organization to measure performance and drive decisions
Solution
Developed a strategy and plan to build an initial version of the data warehouse and analytics capability that included:
- Interviewing internal and external constituents to understand their needs and the questions that could be answered by available data
- Analyzing and prioritizing constituent needs to provide quick wins and a roadmap for analytic capabilities
- Architecting, securing, and implementing AWS environments and services to provide a scalable and extensible foundation for the data warehouse and analytics ecosystem
- Executing an agile process to iteratively ingest data sources and visualize the data utilizing AWS QuickSight
- Providing ongoing change management and training to ensure adoption and maintainability of the solution
- Engaging executives, stakeholders, and constituents throughout the project to ensure delivery of the highest value needs
Outcome
A cost-effective, secure, scalable, and extensible AWS-based solution that:
- Centralized core client data and external data sets in a secure and economic manner
- Automated data pipelines to ingest data updates to reduce ongoing operations and maintenance needs while meeting GDPR and CCPA requirements
- Leveraged AWS AI services to extract raw text from PDF files to address higher ed analytics use cases
- Simplified access to organizational KPIs through numerous visualizations that quickly gauge performance in near real time
- Significantly reduced the amount of time required to produce standard reports and dashboards through self-service, on-demand reporting capabilities, versus former manual processes that took up to two weeks
Published April 25, 2021