The Institute of Food Technologists (IFT) is an international, non-profit scientific society of professionals in food science, food technology, and related areas in academia, government, and industry. It has approximately 11,000 members from more than 90 countries.
Before:
Disconnected Systems Making Data Analysis Challenging
Prior to COVID-19, IFT held over 175 events a year, attracting nearly 20,000 attendees. When COVID hit, IFT needed a new approach to member engagement, and a new marketing strategy to promote their organization.
To do this, IFT needed advanced reporting and analytics capabilities. IFT maintained over 20 distinct systems across its multiple business units, and while individual teams could pull their own information from the systems they used, broader organizational data took weeks to collect. This lack of connection between systems prevented IFT from leveraging more advanced reporting tools and AI/ML capabilities, keeping them from getting better insights into their customers.
With no enterprise data warehouse or source of truth connecting systems, they couldn’t analyze the available data at a larger scale to answer bigger questions. This left IFT unable to analyze their marketing efforts, prioritize customers and features, and understand what would keep their members and customers engaged.
Solution:
A comprehensive roadmap for a new data warehouse
Understanding that the solution would be a major undertaking, Spaulding Ridge proposed an advisory initiative to develop a clear vision of IFT’s new data architecture. The goal was to go from no analytics infrastructure to having a roadmap for the entire enterprise.
We recommended a three-week data assessment to investigate and plan for a new data infrastructure that would allow IFT to better understand its customers and members. The data assessment would enable a precise understanding of the current state of IFT’s data structure, including areas of improvement, blockers, and a roadmap to centralized data efficiency.
Our data assessment process included:
- Value mapping – Five to six meetings with IFT’s business analytics stakeholders to understand each persona of their target audience, enabling clarity on which specific tools would be needed to consolidate audience data.
- Value gap – Examining IFT’s current data architecture to comprehend its technological capabilities versus end user needs, allowing us to prioritize areas to improve.
- Data agenda – Workshops outlining effective collaboration, divergence, and diverse thinking amongst IFT’s internal team, creating a framework to eliminate silos.
- Data roadmap – A recommended process to achieve data readiness. After four hours of discussion, we created a capabilities list and a prioritized roadmap with key data implementation phases.
We presented the roadmap to IFT’s key stakeholders, summarizing the objective of achieving data readiness, identifying key pain points, areas of improvement, technical gaps, and alignment on capabilities to outcomes.
Our recommendations centered on implementing an enterprise data warehouse. We recommended a multi-system data stack, centered on Snowflake, which would ingest data across IFT’s various business units into one source of truth, enabling a data-driven culture and enhancing decision-making outcomes.
“We didn’t want to replace their current reporting structure; we wanted to take it to the next level. Through the advisory initiative we wanted to connect data across platforms that didn’t exist before and help them analyze their performance as an enterprise versus just as a specific team and paint that full picture of customers from different viewpoints.”
After:
A Roadmap to Long-Lasting Data Efficiency
The data assessment provided IFT with a concise one-year roadmap to build a data platform that worked for them, as well as key objectives and metrics for success to improve internal workforce alignment. The roadmap included key details like the total cost of ownership of all technology platforms, detailed information on IFT’s current ineffective data structure to enable executive buy-in, knowledge gaps, and a clear architecture foundation for accelerated implementation. We also highlighted potential add-ons like AI/machine learning and enhancements for the data warehouse.
As a result of our report, IFT has a clear understanding of how centralized business data will benefit their membership operations and a full roadmap to implement. We are currently working with IFT to implement our recommendations.
“At IFT, we collect a wide range of data to better understand and support our community—but when that data lives in silos, its full potential is lost. By integrating our systems, we’re creating a more connected and complete view of our members and how to serve them more effectively. We’re grateful to Spaulding Ridge for their partnership in helping us move this important work forward.”
