Data & Analytics

Two reports, two numbers.

A C-level meeting about revenue is turning into a fight because the finance team and the operations team cannot agree on the number. The root cause? The same metric is defined and calculated differently in four data systems and manually reconciled. We build the data layer that makes one number the trusted number.

Obstacles

Why the Dashboard Does Not Get Used

The number cannot be trusted.

Two systems define active users differently; one report is filtered, the other is not; the discussion is about data, not decisions.

The data is already a day old, but the business needs to decide today.

An overnight batch process worked when decisions were made weekly, but now the business requires answers in real time.

Every new question is a project.

The data pipeline was built to support the report that was needed two years ago, but anything beyond that requires engineers and another change request.

The AI initiative is stalled because the data layer lacks governance.

Both retrieval and prediction need trusted, permissioned, and well-modeled data. Many enterprise AI initiatives are actually bottlenecked at the data layer, not the model layer.

What We Build

What We Build

Data Platform Architecture

Data platforms engineered around your data, not a reference architecture. We will design a data warehouse, a data lakehouse, or a hybrid solution, depending on your needs. Query patterns, data governance, and regulatory requirements are also factored into the design.

Ingestion and Data Pipelines

Batch and streaming pipelines that stitch together data from applications, SaaS, databases, files, and third-party APIs. We build in monitoring to keep pipelines running and data fresh.

Data Modeling and Semantic Layer

Dimensional models and semantic layers that standardize definitions of metrics, dimensions, and segments so that they can appear consistently across dashboards, notebooks, reports, and AI applications.

Data Quality

Design and implementation of automated data freshness, volume, schema, and logic tests so that downstream systems are not polluted with bad data.

Business Intelligence

BI dashboards built around decisions, not deliverables. Governance and smart defaults baked in so that the decisions that matter to your business are actually happening.

Real-Time Analytics

Streaming pipelines that power use cases that require seconds instead of hours or days. Fraud detection, operational analytics, personalization engines, and similar use cases all require fresh data to function.

Data Governance

Implementation of data lineage, cataloging, access controls, retention policies, PII identification and masking, and other governance controls at the data layer. These controls secure your data but also enable enterprise AI initiatives by establishing an audit trail.

Data Analytics Technology Stack

Technology stack

Data Warehouses
  • Snowflake
  • BigQuery
  • Databricks
  • Amazon Redshift
  • Azure Synapse
  • ClickHouse
  • PostgreSQL
Data Pipelines
  • Airflow
  • dbt
  • Fivetran
  • Kafka
  • Spark
  • cloud-native ETL
Business Intelligence
  • Power BI
  • Tableau
  • Looker
  • Metabase
  • Superset
Data Governance
  • Cloud-native catalog
  • OpenLineage
  • dbt tests
  • Great Expectations
Streaming
  • Kafka
  • Amazon Kinesis
  • Google Pub/Sub
  • Flink
AI Enablement

The Data Work AI Depends On

Most stalled enterprise AI programs are blocked at the data layer rather than the model layer. Before a retrieval system or predictive model can deliver business value, four things need to be true:

Accessible

Data needs to be accessible to systems, not just users with the right login credentials

Permissioned

Permissions should be enforced by systems so that AI applications respect the same security controls as humans

Modeled

Business entities and metrics need to be consistently modeled so that AI applications can reason about the same concepts

Documented

Data fields need to be documented so that retrieval systems can reason about what the data means, not just what it contains

Standalone or first step

We can deliver this data work as a standalone engagement or as the first step in a broader enterprise AI initiative.
FAQ

Frequently Asked Questions

A data warehouse is usually a good choice for structured analytics and reporting workloads, while a lakehouse may be a better option if you need to store and analyze unstructured data or machine learning model artifacts. In practice, most enterprises use a warehouse and an object store (lake) – we can help you evaluate which option makes sense for your specific use case.

We can work with any BI tool that runs on top of a data platform. In most cases, the BI tool is less important than the data platform underneath it. If your organization has already licensed a BI tool that your users are comfortable with, there is usually little point in changing it for the sake of analytics.

It depends on how much data you have and how many systems need to be integrated, but we can usually have a pipeline built and a dashboard ready for demonstration within [3] weeks. A complete data platform implementation can take longer, especially if you have complex governance or security requirements – we will be able to give you a more detailed timeline after our discovery session.

You usually need some data before you can train a model, but you do not need a full data platform before you can start an AI project. We will work with you to prioritize the data work that will enable your specific AI use case, rather than building an enterprise data platform in isolation.

Start with a data readiness assessment

Two weeks. Current state, quality findings, governance gaps, and a prioritized roadmap.