Canadian Real Estate Developer
Becoming Data-Driven through an Enterprise Data Strategy & Modern Data Architecture
Project Details
Background
Our client is a Canadian residential and commercial property development organization that is seeking to leverage data and analytics to improve the end-to-end property design, development, and sales lifecycle. Their ultimate objective is to automate as much of the lifecycle as possible to increase the efficiency of collaboration among internal teams while using data to optimize pricing. Throughout workshops and stakeholder sessions, it was jointly decided that before embarking on a technology MVP an enterprise review of existing capabilities, and a plan for a variety of data initiatives was a best practice to ensure that technology met the overarching corporate strategy. The client engaged Data Elephant to build a holistic implementation strategy and roadmap across all data and technology asks taking into account business priority, initiative dependencies, skills required and effort estimates across the roadmap. Data Elephant assembled a small team and completed the work in four weeks.
Challenge
While the organization had some cloud and data capabilities and platforms in place, they were challenged with translating the business’s desires for data solutions into a future state architecture that was customized to their business. They were still leveraging Excel heavily internally across business units and lacked the ability to make informed, data-driven decisions around customers and pricing.
There was a high demand from Sales, Development and Customer Insights for data products and dashboards and multiple overlapping business and technology priorities requiring a common implementation plan.
This created the need for AWS architecture best practices and a review of their existing environment to revise it for innovation and scalability, while leveraging existing technology investments, and a plan to demonstrate how data modernization could improve bottom line.
Outcomes
A Target State Capability Vision for data and analytics was developed that included a Future State AWS Architecture leveraging existing AWS services and 8 new recommended services; Initiatives and Projects Definition to reach target state, including effort and cost estimates, business value and resourcing needs; Prioritized Data Initiatives Roadmap including dependencies and an implementation timeline and detailed budget and business Case inputs.
Why AWS? The client decided to build off of the existing AWS infrastructure to achieve their vision for a scalable and extensible data platform with analytics and ML, as well as straightforward integrations to Power BI, Salesforce, and other internal business applications.
AWS Services Used & Proposed AWS S3, Redshift, Glue, DataBrew, SageMaker, Aurora, Databricks, and MSFT PowerApps.
Why Data Elephant? Data Elephant provided a local presence, flexible engagement model, willingness to invest in pre-sales workshops, and proven experience with both strategy and execution of AWS data projects.