Flagship Group partners with Simpson Associates to modernise their data journey

Overview

Flagship Group is a leading Housing Association committed to providing comprehensive housing services and to solving the housing crisis. With a portfolio of 32,000 homes, Flagship Group has a considerable impact on housing in the East of England.

To support its growth and enhance operational efficiency, Flagship Group sought to optimise its data capabilities. As a data-driven organisation, they have already recognised the potential of data to improve their services and ultimately to deliver a great experience for their customers.

To achieve its future data aspiration goals, Flagship Group partnered with industry experts, Simpson Associates, for a comprehensive Modern Data Analytics Assessment.

Problem

Despite being a forward-thinking organisation with strong foundations in its data-driven practices, Flagship Group wanted to conduct an external review of its data estate with industry data experts to identify what further could be achieved. A Modern Data Analytics Assessment with Simpson Associates seemed to fulfill this brief. By comparing the current state of its data to its desired future state, Flagship aimed to increase the potential of its data and improve its overall value to customers.

Key Challenges faced by Flagship Group included:

Query Performance

The group needed to optimise its data infrastructure and data querying techniques to improve the performance of complex data requests. This will enable timely access to critical information, ensuring the organisation operates more effectively and strategically.

Robust data foundation

Flagship Group lacked the ability to see “a snapshot in time” and baselines for month-on-month and year-on-year comparisons, hindering accurate and consistent analysis.

Transition from Python to low-code environments:

Flagship Group made the decision to move away from Python coding and wanted to leverage AI and machine learning in a low-code environment to enhance its operations and services to tenants and key stakeholders.

Flagship Group are looking to move towards low-code solutions to make machine learning more accessible and sustainable across their organisation, rather than relying on the specific python skills of a small number of individuals in the team.

Streamline development and testing

It was crucial for Flagship Group to separate development and test workloads to create a more efficient and agile environment. Doing so will enable Flagship Group to continue development on the platform without disrupting production processes, reducing the risk of errors and ensuring data integrity.

Enhance data governance

The group wanted to implement robust data governance practices to ensure data quality, consistency and security. Making their data more user-friendly and accessible to the right people at the right time.

 

Solution

Simpson Associates’ comprehensive Modern Data Analytics Assessment identified key opportunities to enhance Flagships Group’s data platform and importantly, the roadmap of how to get there.

To address the group’s challenges and achieve its ambitious goals, we recommended a proven approach that includes:

• Optimising platform structure by implementing a design pattern like Medallion Architecture to streamline processes and enhance performance. This would also help Flagship achieve its aim of Implementing a citizen developer Power BI capability so that the business can meet its increasing needs for data insights.

• Establishing robust change management. By creating dedicated development and test environments with CI/CD processes to minimise risks and ensure smooth transitions.

• Empowering the team by providing training on data modelling patterns to equip employees with the skills to effectively manage data changes.

Key components of the recommended solution:

• Modernising data infrastructure: Leveraging the latest Microsoft technologies (such as Fabric) to optimise data management processes will enhance performance and will allow the group scale to accommodate Flagship Group Housing’s growth and increasing data volumes.
• Purview proof of concept (POC): Conducting a Purview POC to assess its suitability for data mapping, cataloging and sharing across the Group. This will help meet the need at Flagship for documented consistency in its data definitions and terminology.
• Enhancing data accessibility: Empowering teams with self-service analytics tools.
• Building a scalable data foundation: Designing a flexible data architecture that can accommodate future growth and evolving data needs.
• Leveraging emerging technologies: Exploring the potential for low code for the Internet of Things (IoT) data and Artificial Intelligence (AI) techniques to gain easy and deeper insights into operations, optimise resource allocation, and predict future trends.

These enhancements will empower Flagship to make accurate and timely data-driven decisions, drive innovation and scale easily to meet its future goals and requirements.

Key Benefits

The implementation of the recommended solutions are expected to deliver several significant benefits to Flagship Group, including:

• Upskilling of team: Empowering the Group’s employees to better self-serve within Azure and Power BI, continuous development approaches using Azure DevOps and Advanced Data Lake topics such as the use of Delta Format, structuring and portioning for performance and housekeeping tasks.

• Improved data quality and consistency: Establishing a foundation for reliable and trustworthy data.

• Enhanced data accessibility: Empowering a wider range of users to access and leverage data for analysis and better decision making.

• Increased operational efficiency: Streamlining data management processes and reducing manual effort of staff.

• Improved data-driven decision-making: Enabling data-driven insights to support strategic planning and operational improvements.

Conclusion

By building upon its existing strengths and partnering with Simpson Associates, Flagship Group is poised to further elevate its data-driven capabilities, delivering exceptional outcomes for both its tenants and stakeholders.