Tag: data management

The Client

Mediant Health Resources specializes in providing IT subject matter solutions. Mediant’s focus is on driving value through data to improve performance and clinical outcomes. Mediant offers outstanding strategic consulting, project management, and training for many of the nation’s most widely respected healthcare organizations. Mediant Health Resources strives to improve its client’s software systems by providing exceptional IT consultants to both providers and payers.

Executive Summary

Mediant, since its inception, has conducted its day-to-day business (resource management, payroll, commissions, leave, reporting/dashboarding) using non-cloud-based technologies that made it difficult for users to access it remotely. Recently Mediant invested heavily in building a more robust cloud-based application to manage their business. Through the process of building a new application, most of their analytical capabilities were lost due to back-end structural changes

The Challenge

Excel Reporting

Mediant relied heavily on Excel for reporting and dashboarding, which is not easily scalable, lacks security, is not collaborative, and has become unstable

Outdated Architecture

Due to the outdated architecture, Mediant was seeking a fresh new approach to visualizing data and engaged WCI Consulting to help design and implement a solution.

Cost Effective

Understanding the issues that were needing to be resolved, we needed to be able to implement changes and come up with solutions that would last into the future but in a cost-effective way.

Solution

WCI worked closely with the Mediant team to develop a secure, scalable, and easily accessible financial and commissions application (FCA) in the AWS platform. FCA replaced the existing Excel-based data entry application. Some of the AWS services used to create FCA were RDS Postgres, API gateway, Incognito, Lambda, and Amplify. Utilizing WCI’s experience with creating cloud-based data and analytics platforms, AWS Quicksight was deployed to replace the existing outdated excel based approach. WCI felt this was an easy decision due to the simplicity of embedding visualizations into applications, its low cost compared to other visualization tools, its ability to scale, compatibility across multiple devices, and ease of use

Results and Benefits

Because of the ease of employing AWS services, WCI was able to deliver a robust data and analytics platform quickly and at a lower cost than using traditional on-premises solutions.

This AWS solution allows Mediant Health Resources to securely access the FCA application from wherever they are, on any device, not just when they are in the office. This secure solution also allows for the quick adding of new users and the removal of users who are no longer entitled to access the data. Due to the scalability and stability of the platform, Mediant has increased efficiency in its interactions with FCA.

The old excel based data entry methods have been replaced with a responsive application that allows data to be entered in a fraction of the time. Processes that used to take hours have been reduced to minutes. In addition to improving the data entry process, Mediant can now view all analytical content directly in the FCA application using embedded Quicksight visualizations.

With Quicksight, the speed of developing visual content has significantly increased thanks to its ease of connecting to sources, creating content, and deploying that content. As a result, Mediant can deliver enhancements and expand its offerings at a much faster pace than they could on their previous platform.

Aws Quicksight Visualization

A successful data strategy transforms a company’s data into informative insights and financial gains — but it shouldn’t stop with simple reports and charts. Instead, your data should help you look far beyond what’s happening in your business and better plan for the future ahead. With this data at your fingertips and a well-laid data strategy, the possibilities are endless. 

Harness your data and develop a sound strategy that supports your organizational growth and boosts your bottom line. Suppose you want to become data-enabled, start a data-driven transformation program, or grow your organization using data insights. In that case, a comprehensive data strategy is a fundamental must-have for your organization. 

Whether you are already implementing a big data strategy or just starting, these four components are crucial in creating a successful enterprise data strategy that works for your company’s unique needs. 

Things to Change About Your Data Strategy

1. The Purpose of Your Strategy

Before you can use a data strategy, you must first determine the purpose of why you have it in place. How do you want to leverage your data and use it to inform business decisions? It’s essential to identify what it is you want to use data to do. Without a clear strategy, your data won’t inform your plans and decisions within the business.

There is no reason to create a new database for storing data if you haven’t already established how to leverage that data and allow it to inform your decisions. Data uses are numerous, from reporting output numbers and funders to feeding data-driven algorithms that speed up your work and persuade people to join your cause. 

If you’re at the beginning of your data journey or are considering a new strategy at your organization, it may be an excellent time to assess what outcomes you want to achieve with data.

2. Your Data Management Processes and Practices

Data management is a crucial business driver that helps ensure data is gathered, validated, stored, and protected in a standardized, repeatable way. It is essential to develop and deploy the right processes to manage your data so end users are confident that their information is reliable, accessible, and up to date.

You can easily collect data, but managing, organizing, and utilizing that data can make or break the bottom line. If you’re unsure how to process your data, work with a data management consultant who can help your complicated data system adhere to your business objectives and improve your bottom line.

3. Your Approach to Data Governance

Data in today’s day and age is used for everything, and data governance functions, processes, and technologies should be constantly revisited. As you review your data, consider managing data quality, metadata, cataloging, self-service data access, security, and compliance across your enterprise-wide data and analytics lifecycle. Further, extend data governance to foster trust in your data by creating transparency, eliminating bias, and ensuring explainability for data and insights fueled by machine learning and AI.

With mergers, changes in data governance, executive restructuring, new regulations, emerging competitors, and other shifts in the business environment, a flexible approach to enterprise cloud data strategy tailored to your needs is the best option for many businesses. 

Working with WCI Data Solutions ensures long-term business success

WCI Data Solutions supports partners in finding long-term business success when it comes to data management in a variety of ways. We support businesses with the following: 

  • Exploring the current systems through an audit of how your business consumes and uses data
  • Mapping out an Enterprise Data Strategy that caters to the data needs and goals of the organization
  • Building and executing a Roadmap that achieves these strategic initiatives
  • Assuring long-term success by providing post-project support

4. How You Manage Change in Your Strategy

No strategy is ever complete without an element of change management clearly outlined. Adapting your culture to be more holistic and getting stakeholders to work together and formulate the business questions for your data to answer is not easy. Consider how you’ll manage this change in your organization. 

Remember that any effective data strategy aims to tie together the various components of your business data and better inform and discover marketing opportunities through these numbers. Whatever strategy makes the most sense for your organization, embrace it and pivot as you need.

And for all of the other questions you have, an experienced data consulting partner can help.

Need Help Developing A Successful Data Strategy? 

The team at WCI Consulting lives and breathes data. Discover the best ways to manage your data, schedule your free, on-site discovery session with our experts, and spend half a day with people who know data inside and out.

As a business leader, you may understand that data management and business intelligence are essential to your organization’s success. Business analytics enable you to make informed, fast decisions, react to market changes efficiently, and always stay one step ahead of the competition. Companies that successfully implemented master data management continually grow, but how can you ensure that your business’s intelligence is optimized and working for what you need?

If you’re looking to tie together business data from all areas of your company to inform and discover opportunities but aren’t sure how, we’ve got the answer for you.

So What Does Business Intelligence (BI) Include?

Business intelligence refers to the technology that enables businesses to organize, analyze, and contextualize their organization’s data from all aspects of the company in one single source. BI includes multiple tools and techniques that help transform raw data into meaningful and actionable information.

How Is BI Used?

When used correctly, BI can be leveraged by many different organizational departments. For example, sales, marketing, finance, and operations departments can harness business intelligence to help guide their strategies.

For example, various teams and departments may use business intelligence for the following:

  • Data scientists and analysts: Analysts are usually very familiar with BI and use the centralized data to understand where opportunities for improvement exist and what strategic recommendations should be made to company leadership.
  • Finance: Finance departments can blend financial data with operations, marketing, and sales reporting to offer insights into which decisions make the most sense regarding profit and loss.
  • Marketing: BI can help marketers track campaign metrics and efforts from one centralized place. These systems also offer real-time tracking, measure each effort’s performance, and allow marketers to better plan for future campaigns.
  • Sales: Sales data analysts and operation managers often use BI dashboards and key performance indicators (KPIs) to quickly access complex information like discount analysis, customer profitability, and customer lifetime value.

Explore three easy ways your business can start maximizing business analytics, data management, and business intelligence for ongoing success.

1. Evaluate your data management and business intelligence ecosystem

To create a path towards success, you first need to evaluate where you currently stand. Identify how your business uses analytics to drive decisions and communicate across departments. Your marketing, sales, customer service, and other teams are all probably using data analytics in one way or another. Ask yourself if these departments are siloed or collaborative in data management and sharing.

And if you’re not using data at all but seem to be succeeding, the wave you’re riding will only last so long. Without data to drive your decisions, strategy, and path forward, you’re taking shots in the dark and guessing what will work.

As you evaluate your team and how they’re using BI currently, try to keep the following questions in mind:

  • What’s your BI vision, and do you have any? How is that vision aligned with your IT and corporate strategy?
  • Who are your BI players, and how coordinated are they? Is there function overlap?
  • How do you handle data management and data governance? How do you support BI users?
  • What factors do you use to make business decisions?

As you uncover answers about your current business processes and how your team utilizes them across departments, you should see where improvements can be made in areas that cause frustration or hold-ups.

2. Create a strategy

Deliver actionable business insights by creating a business-aligned reporting and analytics strategy. Well-designed data management processes can help your business benefit from productivity improvements, cost efficiencies, and a flexible ability to respond quickly to changing needs.

When your data is well organized and managed, you can reduce data movement, uncover performance breakdowns, and better empower your users to access the information they need in one simple click. In addition, with data management in place, companies like yours can avoid unnecessary duplications, and employees won’t conduct the same research or fulfill the same tasks repeatedly.

A company’s success depends heavily on its ability to make the right decisions quickly. If it takes too long to react to market shifts or activities of competitors, businesses are likely to lose money, miss opportunities, and fall behind the competition. The solution is in organized data, allowing decision-makers to acquire vital information faster and respond appropriately.

3. Emphasize the big picture to employees

It’s essential to train your employees to think critically and make decisions quickly. While all businesses rely on their employees to make critical decisions, in today’s fast-paced economy, it is more important than ever.

The ability to think critically involves analyzing information, interpreting its meaning, and identifying key issues. It also requires seeing both sides of an issue and evaluating the implications that different decisions can create. The ability to make quick decisions depends on how employees can weigh out the pros and cons of various options quickly and efficiently. When employees do learn these skills, businesses gain a competitive edge.

Moreover, they can help ensure that their employees are better equipped to handle the challenges of the modern workplace.

Start achieving success through data management and business intelligence today.

If you’re ready to provide real-time insights and solutions to your team, WCI Consulting can help you make that happen. Learn more about our business intelligence consulting services and how they can help grow and support your business.