Data Management & Integration Solutions Archives - Page 6 of 8

7 signs that your company needs to outsource IT

Posted on: 21 September 2021

From reducing costs to meeting tight project deadlines and accessing specialist expertise, there are many advantages that come with outsourcing IT, but when does outsourcing offer the most benefit to businesses? We asked Brian Robertson, Resource Manager at CACI, to reveal the common signs that indicate a business would be better with an outsourced IT solution.

1. Your IT costs are high

Are budget worries keeping you up at night? Cost control is the most obvious reasons for businesses outsourcing IT. Indeed, a 2020 study by Whitelane Research found that 71% of UK businesses said that cost reduction was the main driver for outsourcing IT. But, is outsourcing really cost-effective?

“Just having a couple of IT specialists on your payroll can really rack up costs,” says Brian. It’s not just high salaries and the cost of employee benefits that are a concern. Companies that opt to run in-house IT departments also face the costs of purchasing, maintaining, and upgrading hardware as well as purchasing the software they need. “With outsourcing, these fixed costs become flexible, allowing you greater control of your budget,” says Brian.

2. You have skills gaps

The severe shortage in tech skills has long been a challenge for businesses, but as Brian explains, “The pandemic put organisations across every industry on a fast-speed trajectory to digitalisation.” He adds, “now, the focus is to keep that momentum going, but we’re seeing that many of our clients are looking for very specific expertise in a fiercely competitive and increasingly expensive marketplace.”

With recent research by ManpowerGroup finding that 69%, of employers globally are struggling to find workers with the right blend of technical and interpersonal skills, it’s clear that many businesses are fighting a losing battle. “This is where working with a trusted IT outsourcing partner can prove to be a strategic move,” says Brian. “A good outsourcer will always assess their client’s requirements holistically – matching skills and experience as well as cultural fit with end goals.”

3. Your IT infrastructure is outdated

“IT infrastructure is a vital component in every business, but it can become a huge drain on productivity, not to mention a growing security risk if not invested in,” warns Brian. He adds, “However, upgrading an outdated infrastructure is a resource investment that many lean I.T departments can ill-afford, creating a stalemate situation that prevents a business from maintaining competitive advantage.”

Therefore, if a business is struggling to maintain and manage its day-to-day IT operations, outsourcing may provide a practical solution. In addition to unlocking access to the latest and greatest tech, working with a reliable IT outsourcing partner will ensure your IT operations are optimised for enhanced performance, releasing your in-house staff to focus their efforts on achieving your business objectives.

4. Your business is vulnerable to security threats

Cyber security breaches are increasing. According to a survey released by GOV.UK last year, 46% of UK businesses and charities reported a cyber attack during the year, with 33% of those claiming they experienced a cyber breach at least once a week in 2020 – up from 22% in 2017.

The growing sophistication of cybercrime puts immense pressure on in-house teams as they struggle to stay on top of critical security practices such as 24/7 networking whilst also maintaining the myriad security systems they have in place. As Brian warns, “When it comes to cyber security, it’s not just a case of having the right technology in place, you need round-the-clock specialists that have the experience and expertise to utilise those tools and prevent potential threats before they become a problem.”

The global shortage in professionals with the right security skill sets are an additional challenge for businesses as they struggle to recruit and retain the specialists they need. Partnering with a trusted IT outsourcer can provide a cost-effective and reliable solution, as outsourcing removes vulnerabilities by ensuring a business’s security defences are ‘always on’.

5. Compliance is a concern

While cyber security is one concern, ensuring regulatory compliance is another, particularly in heavily regulated industries such as financial services. Failure to comply can lead to reputational damage and hefty fines, but to ensure compliance, organisations must have the capability to implement, maintain, monitor, and accurately report on IT infrastructure and security processes. As Brian explains, a partnership with a reliable IT outsourcer can offer significant value to a business that is under pressure to maintain compliance, “As well as providing the necessary resources and expertise to ensure compliance, an outsourcing partner will keep abreast of regulation changes, so your business is always one step ahead.”

6. You need flexibility

When you’re embarking on a new project, getting the right people with the right skill sets in place can be a difficult task. While upskilling your existing team members can be beneficial, inexperience coupled with a limited bandwidth can pose major risks to your project delivery as well as have a negative impact on your day-to-day operations. These problems are more acute if your delivery deadline is tight.

“Hiring new talent in-house is an option, but often it’s not the best one if a project is short-term or requires a range of specialist skill sets,” explains Brian. In these instances, partnering with an IT outsourcer can provide the most strategic, timely and cost-effective route forward because solutions are tailored to your specific needs. “Clients also gain from the insights and expertise of an experienced team – with the added benefit of elasticity to adapt if requirements change,” says Brian.

7. You need niche expertise

More budget-friendly than hiring a team of in-house specialists, and more reliable than challenging your existing team, outsourcing IT is often the most effective option when it comes to delivering projects that require niche expertise such as cyber security. Brian also highlights the benefit of introducing an outside perspective, “One of the most overlooked benefits of outsourcing is that businesses don’t just get access to specific skills and knowledge, they get to tap into a whole wealth of experience.”

“That’s why it’s so important to look for an IT outsourcing partner that has a proven record of proficiency and delivering results. Knowing what’s worked before, how to handle specific challenges, and what pitfalls to avoid –is truly invaluable to finding the solution that’s really going to work for your business.”

Looking for a reliable IT outsourcing partner? Share your requirements with our expert team today.

Why organisations need to start their clean room journey now

Posted on: 22 July 2021

Following CACI and Snowflake’s recent webinar on everything CMO’s need to know about Data Clean Rooms, Jon Ede shares his notes on why organisations need to start their clean room journey now.

Data Sharing

There is a trend developing in the Data Industry which is focused on the controlled and secure sharing of data between brands and companies. More organisations are waking up to the benefits that sharing data between collaborating organisations can bring, either through improved and enhanced marketing strategy and comms, better insight, or just better co-ordinated and closer collaboration.

There are several reasons why a brand might want to collaborate with other organisations to share data. Closer collaboration through secure sharing of data can:

Enhance your understanding of your customer base
Enable you to plan and deliver better marketing
Perform joint marketing with co-operative brands
Assess the prospects of potential JVs

Data sharing allows by creating a frictionless operational process for always on collaboration.

Snowflake’s Data Clean Room

Snowflake have recently launched their Data Clean Room capabilities. The Data Clean Room is a feature that anyone running a Snowflake instance has access to. It allows for seamless and secure sharing of data, meaning that you can share your data with 3^rd Party organisations whilst maintaining full control of the data.

Using cryptographic technology, you are able to decide what data you want to expose to your chosen collaborative partner. Using features within the clean room, you can decide to grant access to specific tables, procedures, views or fields.

This allows you to grant access to the data to achieve your use case. For example, you may only want to share data at a specific segment level, rather than at an encrypted individual level. This can then be refined and altered as the use cases develop.

Diagram showing how three brands can come together to create highly relevant messaging

The ability to create this secure environment and share data whilst it is in situ means that the data is immediately actionable. This has historically been a blocker with these types of environments, but with Snowflake’s Clean Room, you can directly integrate the platform into MarTech, AdTech or analytical and reporting tools.

Making it happen

As a Snowflake partner with expertise in MarTech, AdTech and Data Science, CACI is currently working with major brands to guide them on their Data Clean Room journey. We support through Use Case and Strategy planning, all the way through the set up and ongoing execution.

Beginning your Clean Room journey

We help brands by creating standardised and clean data sets, ready for sharing, and then help by creating matching logic to enable better collaboration. At this point our Data Science and Reporting experts are able to work with all data sharing parties to create models and segmentations and analyse the data for insight and collaboration potential.

Using our extensive MarTech and AdTech knowledge we can also help you activate the Clean Room generated insights into new and pre-existing technology.

For more information on Clean Rooms

If you are interested in expanding your data capabilities to include a Clean Room, get in contact with CACI to arrange a call.

Additionally, you can watch the recording of our webinar with Snowflake: Everything CMO’s Need to Know about Data Clean Rooms

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Helping BT price their services

Posted on: 24 June 2021

The challenge

The balance between price and churn is never an easy one. In a highly competitive market, even the smallest change in rate plans can have a significant impact on a company’s overall revenue.

With a sharp decrease of landline rentals and an increase reliability on bundle packages prices, BT needed to ensure they had full visibility of customer line rental usage as well as a deep understanding of how much they could push price increases without hurting their customer base.

The solution

For over 20 years, BT has partnered with CACI for dynamic re-pricing and analysis. Powered by an in memory powerful platform, this analysis has helped BT maintain its market-leading status.

Recently however, due to increased competition, BT needed more than just a generic analytics platform. They needed a holistic approach to predictive modelling.

To do that, BT utilised CACI’s many years of industry experience of implementing large-scale predictive analytics over granular data, enriched by the CACI service team. By using a complex modelling written in Python and R, including neural networks and complex forecasting methods, CACI has been able to provide BT with predicted outcomes based on BT’s full business customer base, rather than having to rely on samples of aggregated data.

Qlik Sense was used to deliver dashboard solutions to the BT teams, giving them a clear, easily digestible, visualisation of complex analytics. In addition, the Qlik Sense on demand App generation now means BT can change inputs into the algorithms and rely on the in memory platform to process the results in a timely manner.

The results

This strategically outsourced approach has allowed BT to control its costs without constraining creativity.

15 months’ worth of BT’s over all daily calls are analysed and re-priced, allowing BT to have full visibility of the impact of price changes on revenue and customers.

The predictive modelling gives BT much more than just the ability of analysing data at a granular level. It gives BT a deep understanding of its customer’s behaviour, allowing the company to balance churn and price with a minimum impact to customer retention.

Big data in retail banking

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The challenge

CACI were approached in 2003 by a British retail brand about to launch their first personal banking products including credit and debit accounts. They had not previously had a solution in place to store data and were looking for a data warehousing solution that would also support their marketing efforts.

Requirements included business intelligence and management reporting capabilities, including a campaign analytics framework, which led CACI to provide a managed service that would fulfil core functions, including a database management system, a data warehouse and daily finance marts for weekly credit risk evaluation.

The solution

Working in close collaboration from day one, CACI were able to establish the Bank’s requirements with a solution design and project plan. Oracle database, Informatica ETL and MicroStrategy BI reporting were recommended as the most suitable tools for system inception, alongside the campaign marketing tool and SAS analytics.

To ensure quality in delivery and effective controls over delivery, CACI planned and participated in code reviews, system testing and Disaster Recovery testing. CACI implemented Penetration testing and document findings, appointing a dedicated Project Manager as a single point of contact and escalation point for the resolution of issues.

The technical solution was constructed to the Bank’s exact requirements. Services provided included a Service Desk (ITIL compliant), Extract Transform and Load, provision of Basel reporting and provision of data to the Financial Services Compensation Scheme. CACI executed marketing campaigns and daily finance reporting providing liquidity management output, based upon data. The data modelling and analysis services were provided with the execution of monthly finance reporting with consultancy services to analyse, design, develop, test and Quality Assurance, managed by an experienced team of CACI analysts.

CACI fulfilled delivery on-time and on-budget providing service management including 24/7 Oracle database administration, upgrading the warehouse database management system. Reporting client tools, processing data 24/7 into the corporate data warehouse, keeping it current, accurate, secure and available and running development projects allowed the Bank to receive and process data feed files from new suppliers and changing suppliers when required.

CACI’s project implementation methodology incorporated a realistic project estimate, detailed project planning and project management. The solution involved databases ranging from 100 GB to 4 TB in size, a database management system, data management and reporting systems and a strategic data warehouse system. CACI used their release management process guiding each stage through to completion. A mandatory code review and deployment checklist with mandatory testing along with a mature change management process and dress rehearsals prior to project implementation were also included, completing the project on-time and on-budget.

Over the past year, the database space has grown from 4 TB to 6.5 TB, as new data from website activities have been ingested, creating a steady growth rate of 40 GB monthly.

The results

The bank was supported post-implementation by CACI’s Managed Services Programme combining regular reviews, call support of load processes and service availability.

CACI delivered the system integral to business operations satisfying the marketing, financial and regulatory requirements. A stable, secure and reliable system ensured that timely data was available to support all business functions and all 410 users.

In the years since, the data warehouse now stores 80% of the Bank’s data, enabling a single view of the customer across 54 million accounts and 3.7 billion transactions. With 68 data sources being ingested daily, the bank is able to market to existing and new customers in the best way possible, as well as manage their customer data to provide an excellent service.

The Bank have since engaged CACI for multiple projects across their data needs.

Youth Justice Services Cheshire

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Youth Justice Services in Cheshire (covering Cheshire East and West, Halton and Warrington) is one of the largest youth offending teams in the country covering four local authorities. The service benefits from a future-focused, multi-agency and multi-professional youth justice system that complies with the YJB AssetPlus framework, whilst supporting data exchange with 3rd party systems.

The challenge

Youth Justice Services in Cheshire is at the forefront of multiagency innovation with initiatives such as their liaison and diversion services, public protection management, safeguarding and complex-needs boards. Such initiatives depend on timely and effective intelligence and information exchange between multiple agencies that can be accessed securely at any time from a wide range of locations and networks.

The solution

CACI is working with Youth Justice Services in Cheshire, through the recently launched Centre of Excellence partnership, to explore new ways of organising and accessing common data. So far this has involved integrating data from a number of sources across the four local authorities and piloting a new mobile app to enable partner agencies to input case data through a single interface.

The results

CACI’s partnership with Youth Justice Services in Cheshire has helped to better serve young people and their families and generate better life outcomes at lower cost. This is delivered through innovation in the way in which they manage their service and information exchange across the four local authorities, irrespective of political imperatives and priorities.

“Centre of Excellence status is a great opportunity for us to accelerate our plans. It gives us the opportunity to further develop service delivery with innovative technology and functionality, ensuring we can work at the forefront of regional and national practice.”
Gareth Jones, Head of Service, Youth Justice Services in Cheshire

Southampton City Council

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Southampton City Council’s 14 Children’s Centres help ensure children get the best start in life. Since 2007, CACI’s Children’s Centre Manager (CCM) has been used across all centres to record family registration details and the services they use.

The challenge

The solution

Southampton City Council Children’s Centres data team benefit from having access to data from other agencies. Being able to integrate this data was critical but the amount of work involved in managing this process, on ever tighter budgets, was proving difficult for the council. CACI introduced the Hub – a sophisticated data quality and data matching application – which integrates and automatically updates data records between the council and other agencies. After the automated process is complete the user receives a report outlining import results.

The results

Southampton City Council are now able to complete their data integration process within a significantly reduced time period, and have also seen an increase in their data quality.

“Over the course of a year it used to take us in the region of 60 days of effort -this can now be completed in closer to 10 days. This saves us 10 weeks a year!
On top of that we have seen an improvement in data quality. The Hub revealed to us existing quality and duplicate issues that we were unaware of, and we can easily spot any occasional duplicates that may be entered into the CCM database.”
Andy Hart, Management Information Officer, Southampton City Council

Newham Council

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The challenge

Newham Council serves a population of 310,000 and has one of the largest cohorts of pupils in London. It processes in excess of 5,000 reception applications and around 4,000, Year 7 applications every autumn. In addition, it must allocate school places in response to 7,000-8,000 in-year applications per annum.

The council had an existing geographic information system (GIS) that was used to calculate home to school distances to help allocate school places according to strict over-subscription criteria, including which catchment area and parish children live in. This system was very cumbersome and did little to speed up what was a time consuming, complex and stressful task for the council’s school admissions team.

Checking the distance measurements was a rigorous task and an inefficient use of team leader’s time. Newham Council wanted to focus on the family and avoid mistakes so every child received the correct school offer. If, for example, home-to-school distances were inaccurately calculated, it could lead to an increase in appeals, substantial administrative and legal costs, damaging negative publicity and a loss of trust in the community.

While council staff found the demands of the admissions process complex, so too did parents, carers and guardians. Many families found it hard to understand how places were allocated, and high volumes of calls were made to the council’s call centre every year requesting information on home-to-school distances and the precise catchment boundaries. These telephone enquiries were costly for the council, weren’t always helpful for parents, carers and guardians, and the information between the front and the back end systems did not always match.

The solution

Newham Council implemented a two-fold approach, in partnership with CACI they developed a new distance measuring system which rapidly calculates accurate catchment and distance information for each pupil and their school preference. It also integrates with the council’s Local Land and Property Gazetteer (LLPG) to give accurate, up-to-date address information.

CACI and Newham Council also worked alongside Esri UK to implement a geographic information system (GIS), named School Locator app, which integrates with CACI’s admissions system. The app acts as a public-facing web portal, where parents, carers and guardians can see catchment areas, Catholic parishes, closest schools, interactive maps and the all-important home-to-school distances tie-breakers (both shortest walking and straight line), most of which would previously have been impossible for the public to determine without contacting the council by telephone.

The results

The implementation of CACI’s more accurate admissions system and integrated School Locator app, enables the council’s school admissions team to work more productively, processing applications more quickly and efficiently. Significantly, this solution has given Newham Council true confidence in the rigour of its school admissions process and reduced risk. Newham Council’s admissions decisions are now based on even more accurate location information and the same criteria are applied consistently to all applications.

The greatest benefit, for Tracy Jones, Head of Pupil Services at Newham and her team, is the clarity the solution delivers for residents. Schools and families can now simply visit a web portal to see exactly which catchment area pupils live in, identify their nearest schools and calculate distances. There is now complete transparency between the information the council and the parents sees, resulting in complete openness about school admissions decisions.

Newham Council typically handles more than 1,500 school admission appeals a year, at a cost of around £50 each. If the recent implementation of CACI’s admissions system and Esri’s School Locator App were to decrease this figure by just 20 per cent, it would save Newham Council £15,000 a year. By reducing the odds of appeals progressing to judicial review, the new system could potentially save the council many more tens of thousands of pounds.

Hackney Youth Justice service

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Hackney Youth Justice Service works with multiple agencies in the London Borough of Hackney to reduce youth offending and reoffending, and mitigate the impact of crime on families, communities and victims. Information sharing between these agencies is critical to managing the risks and vulnerabilities associated with young people, their families and the community.

The challenge

Hackney Youth Justice Service stores files about young people in its service using a document management system, Open Text eDocs. Adding data to this system was very manual and time consuming, and involved sourcing information from multiple systems. This opened up the risk of error and sharing the wrong information with the wrong people, as well as making data sharing very difficult.

The solution

CACI integrated eDocs with the ChildView youth justice application, ensuring all documents are accessed from a single source. Integration works both ways, so when a file is added to eDocs it is immediately added to the person record in ChildView. The system is used by youth offending workers to access documents from across the council and other agencies including social care and health services.

The results

Since adding an integration layer between eDocs and ChildView, Hackney Youth Justice Service has been able to save considerable time in storing, sharing and acting on information. And because documents are now stored in one place they have also been able to save on IT storage and associated costs.

“The difference that integration between eDocs and ChildView has made to our service cannot be understated. Something as simple as having every single document all in one place saves us time and money, and ensures we are acting on the right information all the time.”
Brendan Finegan, Service Manager, Hackney Youth Justice

Brighton and Hove

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The challenge

Prior to 2013, Brighton and Hove’s Children’s Centres did not have a centralised Management Information System. Data was managed in an ad-hoc manner, primarily through the use of Excel spreadsheets. This made the production of accurate reports a very labour and time intensive task.

Like all Children’s Centres teams across the country, Brighton and Hove were facing an ever increasing dependence on the production of quality information, to demonstrate their impact to Ofsted and to help shape service delivery in the future.

Brighton and Hove also recognised the importance of establishing a robust process around the chosen system, ensuring that all Centres were using it in a uniform way, with a Central Administration team managing core data and producing central reports. The implementation of CACI’s Children’s Centre Manager (CCM) system has enabled a uniform set of activities to be designed and defined by their associated KPI targets.

The solution

Brighton and Hove City Council ran a competitive tendering process early in 2013. CACI’s CCM system demonstrated the unique ability to tailor the solution to satisfy their needs. Following the tendering process and contract award, Brighton & Hove worked closely with CACI to ensure that the implementation of the system was a success.

As well as the core functionality around managing families, services and attendances, Case Work and Reporting, Brighton and Hove also purchased two additional modules – Barcoding and Messaging, which allow for time saving around attendance recording through the implementation of barcoded registers and membership cards. To enable the Centres to identify specific groups and send pertinent messages (e.g. details of the next smoking cessation course to ‘Smoking Parents’) the Text Messaging module has also been implemented.

Results and benefits

Brighton and Hove’s Children’s Centres’ integration with Health led to information on new births being directly imported into the CCM on a regular basis. This has resulted in greater data accuracy, substantial time saving on data input and the ability to easily combine data sets across NHS and Council systems. CACI developed a procedure which handles this upload automatically; skilfully and patiently negotiating the data security protocols of two large, public organisations.

The solution has resulted in standardisation of attendance data across the entire service, which has meant a systematic approach to assessing performance, more confident completion of OFSTED Self Evaluation Forms and better transparency and accountability to the Advisory Groups that govern each centre.

“Moving from our existing attendance management system to CACI’s CCM felt like a daunting task at first, but the confidence, experience and clarity of guidance they offered during the planning stages was exceptional, and the resulting migration was faultless. Following the painless implementation project, the ongoing support has been responsive and dedicated. I’m yet to find a problem they can’t solve, and the people are quite nice too.”
Ben Miles, Performance Analyst, Brighton & Hove City Council