DATA MANAGEMENT CONSULTANCY

ADVISORY SERVICES | TECHNICAL DESIGN | EXPERT DELIVERY

With the advent of new technologies and capabilities like Data Science, Robotics, Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence and the rapid pace of competitive and organisational change driving complex data programs, it’s never been more important to have a focus on best practice Data Management.

We have built our reputation over the years on our skills and expertise in Data Management and can provide expert services in advisory, design and delivery. Our services can be provided from both a technology agnostic point of view, while leveraging our deep technology expertise with popular Data Management technologies.

Our experience allows us to help our clients across all pillars of Data Management. From helping clients define their Data Strategy and Data Governance Framework through to design and development of Enterprise Data Warehouses to feed organisations analytics and reporting efforts.

Our core Data Management services include:
Data Warehousing Design and Delivery
Data Integration and ETL
Data Strategy
Data Governance Strategy & Delivery
Data Quality Solutions & Reporting
Data Migration Strategy & Execution
MDM Strategy
Data Lineage & Metadata Management
Data Profiling Consultancy
Data Architecture
Big Data
Data Preparation
Cloud Data Engineering
Data Quality

DATA WAREHOUSE CONSULTANCY

UNLOCK THE POTENTIAL OF YOUR DATA

Our clients often engage GDS for advice and best-practice support building Data Warehouses for their project, function, or business. You can benefit from our experience delivering Data Warehousing solutions for hundreds of projects across multiple industries.

WHY DO I NEED A DATA WAREHOUSE?

A Data Warehouse is a copy of all of your business data that has been cleansed, integrated together and presented ready for querying. A Data Warehouse provides “one version of the truth” by supporting reports and dashboards that can detail everything that is going on across the business.

DATA WAREHOUSING SUPPORT FROM GDS:

Your business probably uses lots of different systems, eg for finance, operations, HR, etc. The way that these systems work together is likely to be unique to your business and so it is important to be able to get the full picture that all the data in these systems represents.  It is possible to combine data from different systems report-by-report but this is time-consuming and soon becomes complicated. 
 
The answer is to build a Data Warehouse that holds a separate copy of all your data which is used just for running “Business Intelligence” reports and dashboards against.
 
Data Warehouses have been around for many years now but they are still a tried and tested method of bringing all your data together.
 

HOW DOES A DATA WAREHOUSE WORK?

A series of “ETL” processes are built to Extract, Transform and Load the data from each source system into the Data Warehouse. The data being loaded is cleansed, to resolve any problems with it, and the data from different sources is joined together.
 
The Data Warehouse is structured to answer queries quickly and to allow data items to be combined in any logical fashion allowing a wide range of queries to be answered. A full history of changes is usually also kept allowing historical and trend reporting
 
Standard BI tools can then be used to create reports and dashboards

What Can a Data Warehouse Do?

A Data Warehouse can allow you to
  • Combine data from multiple sources to enable cross-business analysis
  • Provide a single view of all activity across the business
  • Separate reporting from transactional functions to ensure that core business is not adversely affected when reports are run
  • Maintain a full history of all data changes and updates (even if the source systems do not), allowing performance to be compared across time
  • Allow different types of reports and dashboards to be created using different tools
  • Control data access to specific users or groups of users
  • Provide “one version of the truth” for the entire business

What are the Common Data Warehouse Challenges That GDS Can Help With?

  • Technology Integration – Our wide range of technical expertise can help clients integrate any technology within their Data Warehouse landscape
  • Skills Gaps – We can support your project, overcoming any Data Warehousing skills gaps or challenges
  • Data Quality – We can help you to ensure Data Quality within your Data Warehouse project, using best practice Data Management principles that we have developed over many previous projects
  • Real Time – We can help with the complexities of streaming real time data into a Data Warehouse
  • Expensive to Maintain – We can ensure your Data Warehouse enhancement costs are managed effectively ensuring the right task is executed with the right people, at the right time
  • Unstructured Data – We can help you to overcome the challenges of both integrating and reporting on unstructured and semi-structured data
  • Cloud Data Warehouse – We can help you understand the pros and cons of putting a data warehouse in the cloud and we can help you build a cloud data warehouse or migrate your on-prem data warehouse into the cloud. Whilst we work with all the major cloud providers we are also Snowflake partners and so we can help implement a “cloud-agnostic” data warehouse

What Other Data Warehouse Services Does GDS Offer?

  • Data Warehouse review / assessment
  • Data Warehouse design and implementation
  • Project Management of a Data Warehouse implementation or extension
  • Assistance with a Data Warehouse tool selection

DATA MIGRATION CONSULTANCY

MANAGE YOUR DATA MIGRATION EFFECTIVELY WITH GDS’S DATA MIGRATION SOLUTIONS

Benefit from our expertise and experience in delivering complex Data Migration solutions across multiple industries.

Data Migration is the movement of data from a source to target system. It is usually required as a result of the introduction of a new business system – whether through a system consolidation, an application upgrade, a new data warehousing solution, or a company merger.

The process is often seen by companies as a necessary evil of large-scale, expensive IT projects. As a result, it can be easy to focus on the more attractive aspects of such projects – the front-end system – whilst underestimating the size and complexity of actually getting the data in there.

DATA MIGRATION CHALLENGES:

  • Technology integration
  • Skill gaps
  • Data quality
  • Expensive to scale
  • Unstructured data
  • Migration strategy
  • Timeline, planning and scheduling
  • Assurance on migration and data
  • Less disruption

BENEFITS OF GDS DATA MIGRATION SOLUTIONS:

  • Help clients integrate with any technology using our experts in leading Data Migration technologies
  • Support your project, overcoming skill gaps or challenges with resourcing capacity
  • Ensure Data Quality within your Data Migration project, using best practice Data Migration principles we have developed over 100’s of projects
  • Offer a seamless migration process – users of the new system/application will not worry about the data, but instead will be able to enjoy the benefits of the system upgrade
  • Offer complete transparency through thorough system and unit testing, as well as reporting and validation
  • Effectively manage costs ensuring the right plan is executed with the right people, at the right time
  • Integrate data from multiple sources, across structured and unstructured data types for completeness
  • Help to overcome challenges migrating unstructured data
  • Maintain and improve data quality and integrity
  • Minimize downtime for the users within the business
  • Minimize remedial fixes

GDS DATA MIGRATION SOLUTIONS:

  • Data Integrity Review / Assessment
  • Data Migration Review / Assessment
  • Data Migration Programme Design & Implementation
  • Project Management
  • Tool Selection for Data Migration

The GDS Data Migration Accelerator (DDMA):

At GDS, we recognize the challenges affecting certainty of delivery, such as:
  • data quality issues repeatedly derailing migration runs
  • “coding” of mappings slowing speed of delivery
  • common transformations repeatedly and inconsistently been created
To mitigate these, we have created the GDS Migration Accelerator that manages flow control of migration runs and allows mappings and transformations to be declared – rather than coded – using spreadsheets. 
 
DDMA increases the transparency of the migration process for validation and QA purposes and mitigates delivery risk substantially, reducing time and cost to execute your data migration.