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The Smith Family is a national, independent Australian non-profit tackling the issue of children’s poverty. With one in six Australian children and young people living in poverty, this is a heart-breaking social issue. By providing support through programs in literacy, numeracy, technology, and mentoring – among others – the organization is helping create a lasting impact for future generations of families.
The Smith Family’s educational efforts are supported by a complex BI environment. Their team of data architects work in an agile environment with a new release every two weeks. With such a rapid development pace, it becomes more important than ever to keep track of process changes such column additions, table updates or report modifications, and to predict their impact on the system overall. At the same time, investing significant time in impact analysis would slow down the development to an unacceptable pace.
It is a catch-22 that had The Smith Family’s data team feeling stuck for years. They were constantly on the lookout for a tool that could provide impact analysis for new business processes at the pace they needed… and then they found Octopai.
With Octopai’s end-to-end data lineage, The Smith Family’s data team was able to cut their typical one to two day impact analysis for new short processes down to a simple ONE HOUR routine.
The Smith Family finally had the adaptability and agility they needed to move forward at their ideal pace, with the security of knowing that doing so would not result in unpleasant surprises.
Furthermore, when The Smith Family’s BI environment of SSIS, SQL, and Power BI underwent a massive migration process from on-premises to MS Azure, Octopai was a critical part of making the migration go smoothly. With Octopai’s support of Azure Data Factory (the first platform to do so in a complex environment) and full visibility to SSIS, it was heavily used in planning the data processes and data migration, and specifically in identifying loopholes while delivering such a complex migration.
In addition, The Smith Family’s developers have found other areas where Octopai’s platform measurably enhances their development process:
Providing unprecedented visibility and trust into the most complex data environments.
