Success story

Transforming data strategy at an education nonprofit

By Julianne Hall

Background 

Our client is a non-profit organization that administers exams and educational services for tens of thousands of students each year.

Challenge

Due to the scale at which the association operates, they use over 70 technology applications to serve their member organizations. Historically, different parts of the association utilized different combinations of applications, which created a lack of standardization across their offerings in terms of UX, infrastructure, and security. 

In regards to the analytics lifecycle, our client had multiple data sources (including OLTP databases, replica databases, and data warehouses) and multiple visualization technologies. The quantity and variety of data sources and tools used for each application created a data swamp and made it difficult to gather and report on data across portfolios. Furthermore, the variation across applications made oversight and data governance difficult, since there weren’t standard tools and processes across the member organizations’ product teams.

The association decided to embark on a modernization effort to break down silos, improve applications, and standardize the way they collect, analyze, and visualize data. 

Solution

Keyrus partnered with the association to provide guidance on their data and IT modernization initiative. Our team consulted on data infrastructure and productionization to ensure that the data services would be secure, performant, and scalable. The focus of this partnership was based on the data and analytics piece of the solution, both for their internal users as well as their external members.

To ensure end-to-end success on this project, Keyrus collaborated with the association’s Data Services Team (DST) to establish a foundational model and clear guidelines for growing the data platform. This required creating data policies, standard operating procedures, and data lake strategy. We also completed a tech evaluation, through which we determined that Informatica, Snowflake, and Tableau built on top of AWS would provide the best comprehensive solution for the movement, storage, and analytics of this initiative.

Once the foundational model and guidelines were complete, Keyrus designed and began the implementation phase for these platforms. The build included the foundation and infrastructure needed to support the platform as well as the governance and change management around the solution. Finally, we partnered with the association to announce the new solution with updated branding and a new name.

Results

After these first few initiatives:

• Association members will have a more interactive and user-friendly way to access and analyze the data provided by the association

• Program Directors will be better able to filter and analyze information about the population they serve, allowing for faster decision-making 

• The association’s analytics will be centralized and maintainable, allowing for quicker and easier updates yielding better services for the association’s members

• The association’s team can reference an organized and clear roadmap to better structure future initiatives