The Story
Business Challenge: Too Many Cooks, Too Many Kitchens
Metaphorically, a company’s raw data is akin to the individual ingredients one might find within a restaurant’s kitchen. Each element has its unique flavor, expiration date, quality, and storage requirements. However, one must exercise caution when combining these ingredients into a meal.
Improperly stored or mixed, the ingredients can yield unappetizing and/or unexpected cuisine.
Often, rather than attempting to cook, most diners should remain in the dining room to feast on meals prepared by experts, based on approved recipes.
Lacking a central, standardized environment, our client was effectively allowing its analysts to prepare meals freely within multiple kitchens throughout the company. Ingredients were often uninspected, and analyses were often half-baked.
To complicate matters, our client also lacked proper utensils — it did not employ any contemporary business intelligence tools.
The uncontrolled and outdated environment significantly handicapped our client’s ability to analyze operational performance uniformly:
- Critical system data was sporadically collected and stored in a variety of formats (e.g. SAS, MS Access, SQL Server, etc.)
- The absence of centralized, comprehensive metadata allowed analysts from across the company to interpret the meaning of same data element differently
- Key business segments like product, line of business, and customer type did not have standard, enterprise definitions due to a lack of governance and consensus
- Decentralized calculation of critical KPIs by multiple analysts yielded conflicting results
Transformation: The Right Recipe
The Healthcare leader sought a rapid, thorough method of promoting uniform data analysis. It needed properly-stored and inspected ingredients, consistent calculation recipes, a standardized menu of data offerings, and a dining area where users could partake of properly prepared information.
Two decisive factors contributed to their selection of Eliassen Group to lead the transformation:
- Eliassen Group’s unique, automated approach to data integration and architecture construction
- Eliassen Group’s use of multi-dimensional experts in technology and finance to deliver business-optimized solutions
Results: Appetizing Results
The Eliassen Group solution was an incredible win for our client.
With access to a comprehensive metadata repository, the company cultivated a common, enterprise-wide understanding of its data.
Functional units analyzing claim and contract performance now produce and communicate congruent results.
The introduction of interactive, dashboard-based analytics has also promoted a culture of self-service analysis, broadening the reach and use of data within the organization. This has led to dramatic improvements in how the company establishes claim loss reserves and how it negotiates value-based care agreements with providers.
