Testimonial: Scott Morrow – Co-ordinator Service Excellence, Glen Eira City Council: “The team at Exposé was very pleasant and professional to work with. That, combined with their exceptional domain expertise relating to Microsoft and the Power BI Service mean that Glen Eira now has the necessary foundation, architecture, and governance to support our analytical needs going forward long into the future.”
The Problem
The council’s information consumers operate across multiple systems which may, or may not, have built-in reporting. They rely on Excel to analyse the separate data sets, and on the BI team to make new data extracts available for each use case. The preparation of the data from the separate systems requires technical skills and can be time consuming which leads to an unnecessary backlog and delay in data availability. The BI team wants to move to an interactive, self-service BI platform but is not sure of the best way to approach this in a secure and governed manner. They are aware of advanced use cases like machine learning, AI and IoT and requires the platform to accommodate for those workloads. Exposé was engaged to assist the council in starting this journey to a governed, yet modern, enterprise BI platform.
The Solution
In collaboration with the council, Exposé have designed a bespoke Reference Architecture which goes beyond conventional BI to also include their modern and aspirational workloads. Guardrails for Power BI are now governed and outlined in an Operational Framework which accounts for the different roles that individuals may fill within the analytics platform. By linking the council’s own Azure Data Lake to the Power BI Dataflows they now have authoritative, governed data entities that can be leveraged by other platforms outside of Power BI, as well as by authoritative Power BI models. The project culminated in Exposé developing a sample end to end solution and facilitating masterclasses from this solution for data preparation, data modelling, report creation, and governance. All within this new enterprise data platform.
Business Benefit
Authoritative data assets, maintained in the cloud, which can be used by any platform.
- An increase in data velocity from sourcing the data to visualisation and analysis.
- Cost effective storage and processing of data.
- The platform is easily scalable, allowing for future growth and temporarily handling large processes (scaling back down afterwards).
- A reference architecture that is ready for data from IoT devices, real-time analytics, and advanced workloads like machine learning and AI.
- Empowered users who feel comfortable exploring the governed data assets whenever they want to, without needing the assistance of technical developers.
Download our case study here.