The agency found itself in a difficult position; since there was never a selection of a centralized, enterprise-level Analytical tool, members tasked with creating the various reports were using localized, siloed tools, such as Excel spreadsheets and Microsoft Access databases. Data acquisition was also problematic. Since the data lived in several source systems and there was no central data warehouse, people found themselves downloading and assembling data manually. This process was slow, cumbersome and error prone.

After studying the existing methods used to acquire and analyze data, Arisant looked at different options and determined that the best plan of action would be to design a solution based on a centralized warehouse and Oracle Analytics Server (OAS) – an on-premises self-service visualization and augmented analytics platform. OAS would allow the agency to perform the different types of analyses required with very little effort and also enable power users to access data directly and perform their own data analysis. Arisant leveraged Oracle Data Integrator, a comprehensive data integration platform, to fully automate data acquisition from several disparate source systems. Deduplication and data transformation rules ensured high data quality, something that was lacking with the previous manual approach. Arisant built out several key dashboards for executives as well as detailed analyses with interactive features such as drill down/drill across capabilities, and visualizations to help explain the data better. Data delivery services have been fully automated since with OAS Arisant was able to schedule automated report and dashboard deliveries to different constituents.

The results were obvious right away;  all the manual steps involved around data acquisition were eliminated since the implemented jobs collect, process and store data in a central warehouse automatically. Users noticed that data accuracy was improved immensely and this created huge productivity gains and significant time and resource savings from IT staff that were once working on these tasks manually. The dashboards that Arisant created are used by a wide user audience looking to gain immediate business insights and power users leverage the self-serve features of OAS to create their own analyses.

Since this was a huge success, the agency is now working with Arisant exploring new data sets to grow the solution.