A Modern Data Stack Enhances Decision-Making Capabilities – Harvard Business Publishing

Before:

Aligning Data Models with Harvard’s Strategic Direction

Harvard Business Publishing (HBP) decided to prioritize data-driven products to deliver more value to learners, leading them to reevaluate their data models to align with the new strategic direction. This strategy sharpened the focus on data to understand and solve each individual’s problems. However, it also presented a new challenge for the small enterprise data team, which had previously focused primarily on operations and financial analysis.

The data team was already in the midst of a major data transformation project, including building out a cloud data warehouse for the first time. They had recently completed a tool evaluation and selected a stack comprised of best-in-class technologies, including Snowflake Data Cloud, dbt for data transformation and modeling, and Fivetran for data integration.

Now, they needed to accelerate the data ingestion process and integrate data from dozens of different data sources into Snowflake. Fivetran was a great fit for this effort based on the tool’s large catalog of data connectors, the level of built-in automation, and the ability to scale along with HBP’s data strategy.

With the tools and strategy in place, there was just one missing piece: resources. The team began searching for a solutions integration partner to help implement a modern data stack effectively and efficiently.

Solution:

Enhancing Decision-Making with Business-Centric Data Presentations

The team at HBP chose Data Clymer, a Spaulding Ridge company, based on its technical competence and awareness of dbt best practices. During discovery and implementation, we worked with HBP to discover and validate work streams that would drive impact for the business and provide data quality benchmarks for the immediate and long-term.

We also provided highly collaborative mentoring, training, and guidance to help HBP mature their own data engineering and transformation skills. We understood the company’s data from a business perspective and presented it in a way that made sense to their stakeholders. This enabled solution ownership over time and drove them to make informed decisions.

“Data Clymer’s dbt expertise was a driving factor, especially the knowledge around leveraging advanced functionality like automation. They had broad experience with solutions that could be force-multipliers and enable our team to be more effective and efficient in developing, owning, and testing code.”

• Maria Herrera, Associate Director of Data Engineering, HBP