Modernizing an Organization’s Process and Data Warehouse to Drive $10M ROI

The Challenge

A large international organization was experiencing a tremendous increase in data volume, projects, and demand for analytics, but their legacy data warehousing systems, in addition to a legacy approach to data warehousing, could not adequately address the organization’s needs.

Over time, the organization’s business users created a vast number of tactical data solutions, initially built to serve single purposes.   Large data silos popped up everywhere, creating a tangled web of massive, decentralized data stores where “shadow” data and analytics resources outnumbered IT resources nearly four-to-one.  Limited capacity in IT forced business areas to solve data management challenges with tactical, non-scalable, and non-reusable solutions.   This “technical debt” became a burden for the organization and created tremendous risk.

To realize the full value of the client’s data, Data Ideology was brought in to modernize their legacy approach to data warehousing, develop a framework for a modern data platform, drive adoption of modern analytics tools, and institute organizational change to close the gap between business and IT.  

The Solution

The Data Ideology team started with investigating the core issues and needs the client team expressed. Data Ideology performed a detailed assessment with key business stakeholders across the business, focusing on people, process, data, and technology.

Key to this evaluation was creating a clear current state of the client’s data and analytics environment, focusing on organizational challenges and total economic impact, their desired future state, and the gaps standing between them.

Next, the Data Ideology team designed the future-state architecture focused on meeting the defined business needs, recommending a pilot project to prove the value of the proposed future state.

Combined with the overall business case and ROI projection – if the future state data and analytics platform were realized – Data Ideology provided a comprehensive analysis of key metrics and business processes that could help the client identify high priority areas where centralized data solutions would be needed first.

The Result

Data Ideology helped the client develop a modern, centralized data platform, leveraging Snowflake Cloud Data Platform.  Data Ideology’s modern approach combined with a modern technology platform with Snowflake enabled the organization to rapidly develop new data assets to drive innovative analytics use cases.   The organization has been able to sunset manual processes and legacy data warehousing processes in exchange for modern ones that are reusable, scalable, and engaging for business users and executives alike.

Data Ideology’s work with this large international organization enabled them to realize immediate and measurable business value from the pilot project, as well as reallocating 1.5 FTE’s who were managing manual processes to more valuable analytic activities.

Executives expect to recognize a $10M+ ROI within the first 24 months of implementation in addition to unlocking brand new analytics capabilities with new levels of data access and centralization.