Business Situation:

The governing health and safety organization was interested in becoming much more innovative in their approach to the data they collect as part of their operations to cover workers’ claims.

In particular, they needed to improve the quality, agility, and adoption of their data by a Business Intelligence team that was being formed in the organization. Previous traditional efforts on building data warehouses and OLAP models had suffered from long delays, lack of trust and understanding of the data, and poor data quality.

Solution Story:

Imaginet helped this client build a BI team based on Agile Analytics practices, using Visual Studio Team Services, automated builds, Scrum development practices, automated testing, and many services from Microsoft SQL Server 2012.

The redevelopment effort used Excel PowerPivot to expose the claims data to the current data scientists and business analysts to ensure that all aspects of the data was thoroughly understood – names, data quality, formatting, and most of all business value.

BI developers used the Excel prototype as a specification for development which was driven by agile disciplines, such as small development increments, the use of automated tests to ensure quality, and team collaboration to continually improve the development process and increase velocity. Automated builds and deployments increased the frequency and decreased the risk of production deployments so that the team could respond to user feedback quickly.

Through Imaginet’s mentoring, the clients BI team learned agile practices and team disciplines to focus on quality and velocity and agility. The data warehouse and data models produced by the BI team are now much more trusted by analysts and adoption has increased greatly, as the team focuses on producing value for the analysts in a timely manner.