Case Study: Enterprise Data Governance, Management, and Strategy

Challenge/Scope

Our federal civilian customer was challenged with significant civilian and government reporting requirements. With over 100 databases, some holding multiple terabytes of data, the agency needed enterprise governance, data management, and database development support. Our customer had information in each database containing different data definitions and data fields that often did not map to each other.

Approach/Solution

Highlight developed a streamlined process to create an AWS cloud-based data warehouse and moved key databases to the cloud. In less than a year, we created a data lake leveraging Commercial Off-the-Shelf (COTS) and cloud-based tools like MicroStrategy, Amazon Redshift, Oracle, and PostgreSQL to perform ETL analysis and provide meaningful reporting as a basis for informed decision making.
We migrated and consolidated multiple high-risk legacy to modern database technology, resolving the risk of data loss or impact to operations. We created enterprise-wide data dictionaries and standards for more effective information sharing, enhancing data architecture design and data analysis capabilities. As a result, created a path to reduce system redundancy, improve current system utilization, and develop or acquire solutions to meet enterprise data management needs.

Highlight also implemented a Business Intelligence (BI) reporting function for the Enterprise, which maintains USAC data across four main data areas. We ingested, catalogued, and enabled over 10,000 data elements, 50+ datasets, 200+ reports, and 40+ dashboards using MicroStrategy and other tools. As a result, this data is now available in MicroStrategy in a consumable way for more powerful reports, helping USAC pass its OMB and OIG audits.

With this system in place, our customer can query its most important data quickly in a single system, performing analysis across the enterprise and providing insights unavailable to policy makers and managers just one year prior.

Capabilities

• IT Strategic Planning
• Enterprise Architecture (EA)
• Change Management
• Records Management
• Data Management and Analytics
• Business Intelligence
• Database Management

Results/Outcomes

Highlight helped our customer successfully realize multiple enterprise initiatives and implement the goals of the IT Strategic Plan. We created an enterprise data warehouse with accompanying data lake on modernized infrastructure using the AWS cloud. Now, the agency can perform data modeling, data mining, and predictive analysis with consolidation of tools saving the agency over $200K annually.