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Alarmed at the magnitude of the current youth mental health crisis, a leading national provider of behavioral health services has doubled down on its efforts to help youths in crisis overcome their challenges and thrive.
To grow their national presence and footprint, the organization needed a partner who could help them modernize, mature, scale, and stabilize their data, analytics, and BI capabilities. They decided to leverage the services and expertise of our Onebridge team to get them to their goal.
When we first began working with this client, we encountered a problem common to many modern organizations. The company’s data reporting structure was decentralized and couldn’t support the blending of data from various sources. That means there was no consistent view into the organization or the value it provides.
Common data attributes generated by varying business processes across CRM, EHR, custom web apps, manual excel files, and ERP were inconsistently reported or required a high degree of human intervention and effort to use for internal and external reporting.
Rectifying this would be critical to helping our client confidently and consistently answer business questions that drive strategic decisions and tactical actions.
Our Onebridge team dove in by conducting a modern analytics assessment of our client’s current state. This assessment, called COMPASS, is both an evaluation and a process to solve data problems. COMPASS is based on Onebridge’s Modern Analytics Platform (MAP) framework that details everything you will encounter and must consider in your journey to solve a data problem.
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COMPASS makes the MAP framework come alive by providing a checklist of these factors, identifying where there are gaps, what needs to be repaired, and making those repairs – or (if a client prefers) explaining what items must be fixed and how.
The deliverable at the end of our assessment was an actionable plan that included prioritizing business goals and objectives and framing an implementation roadmap. This laid a foundation for delivering business value in the short term while simultaneously establishing a sustainable path for long-term and future endeavors, such as predictive and prescriptive analytics and decision intelligence. That’s the big picture.
The details are that we took a customer-centric approach by interviewing different stakeholders to understand their challenges, opportunities, and vision. We then developed initial use cases, related objectives to the company’s value streams, began defining measurable key results, and laid the groundwork for a strategic roadmap that delivers both foundational and emerging capabilities required to achieve end-in-mind outcomes.
The roadmap’s foundational capabilities will balance “trust, supply, and analyze” themes within smaller projects and organizational programs focused on data governance, master data management (MDM), BI solution development, and Agile transformation.
We evaluated, assessed, and planned activities around data modeling and architecture, BI and data management focused on the company’s existing KPIs, as well as the framework and model for how their IT organization supports and delivers data, analytics, and BI to the organization.
One major challenge was that the client had to continuously prioritize and satisfy on-demand data and reporting needs, and at the same time not lose sight of the bigger goal of building a methodical foundation for better reporting moving forward.
So, while they needed to get people the data reports they needed when they need it, they were still on the hook to establish that foundation to grow, scale, and mature. This would be a juggling act – urgent data needs of today versus better data with an enhanced experience for tomorrow.
The solution to that problem, which we implemented upstream, was demand management. That means all data reporting requests that were being sent to IT would go through an intake for triage, get evaluated for viability, feasibility, and value, then be ready for prioritization and selection before being placed and ranked among the inventory of work managed and orchestrated for development and delivery through a DevOps process using Agile principles.
As a result, all work entering the IT organization was now brought to light, providing visibility and transparency for tactical planning purposes – all of which was not available before. Now the IT organization had an end-to-end holistic portfolio view of all their work and was equipped for better decision making, capacity planning, delivery orchestration, and release management.
Custom Solutions
As discussed, our COMPASS assessment does not stop at providing a “checklist” of what must be done and a prioritized roadmap that explains how to do it. We also fix issues, as we did for the demand management problem. Here is a fuller list of the solutions we’ve built so far. Our work on this initiative continues even today:
Before we started working with our client, they didn’t have a consistent view into the value of functions and processes occurring throughout the business. We are fixing many of these issues and developed a full collection of BI reports and dashboards, previously not available. These reports and dashboards include, but are not limited to the following:
“I want to let you all know that your accomplishments are not going unnoticed. Thank you for being a true partner to our company and a part of our mission; ultimately helping families in a time of need and bringing them back together. I know the goal is for “Onebridge to work themselves out of a job” . . . we still have a lot to accomplish before that happens, but I feel confident we will get there, and the talent our organization is bringing in you will help guide/mentor as we grow them.
Thanks again and I look forward to the continued success with our partnership!”
-Client's Director of IT
