Strategic Revamp Provides The Key To Unlock The Power of…

Challenge

A state agency was facing a growing technical backlog and discrepancies in reporting capabilities between business units. This was largely due to an inability to effectively coordinate reporting and data development requests, as well as a third party reporting system that was at end-of-life. Shadow IT within business units were duplicating development efforts as the reporting architecture was immature and reporting needs were handled on an ad-hoc basis. A lack of effective publishing capabilities continued to fuel this issue.

The agency wanted to implement a data solution and reporting tool to support their business units' needs, avoid duplication of efforts, and facilitate a better user experience with improved access to data. In addition, they needed to improve their data management processes with best practices and standards to support their technical backlog and continue to increase their reporting architecture maturity. This would enable IT support any future agency reporting and data requirements.

CapTech was selected given our experience in implementing data management and reporting tools at scale, and our knowledge of the agency’s business.

Approach

Creating The Roadmap

We conducted a current-state analysis, including documentation reviews and stakeholder interviews, and provided an exhaustive report on the organization’s current state. This report included documentation on the organization’s data flow process, a review of the current reporting tool, specifically its usage in report creation and management, a breakdown of major pain points and their root causes, a review of risks and current projects, a data management maturity evaluation scored against multiple commonly used models, and a formal SWOT analysis.

In addition to identifying and documenting the current-state data and reporting landscape, CapTech developed a clear strategic vision and a roadmap towards that vision, with specific tasks to be completed. CapTech was able to provide recommendations on tools and vendors that would best fit the organization, specifics for task completion, including time and resources required, and guidance on navigating inter-dependencies between roadmap steps.

Results

Since delivery of the analysis, the agency has enjoyed improved efficiency, employee satisfaction, and cost savings, as well as more valuable, accurate, and actionable data insights. The steps they've taken in the roadmap include: creation of a data team structure that focuses on data management and support; redefined enterprise data governance, which establishes new standards and tasks enterprise architects and IT leadership with enforcing those standards; implementation of additional technology solutions to better support reporting and data visualization; and finally, reduction of the backlog through dedicated project management experts tasked with improving and managing priorities.