Recently Stellar engaged in interesting project work at Hamilton City Council. Nathan Dalgety, Hamilton City Council Analytics Programme Manager, gave us a short interview regarding the job we have done.
What was your business problem?
Hamilton is one of the fastest-growing cities in New Zealand. In order to optimise the response to growth, Hamilton City Council (“HCC”) requires a clear and coherent picture of the city to inform decision making on strategic, financial, infrastructure, community, and planning matters.
We need reporting models that support strategic decision making and tactical operations. We used to hold the underlying data models in many disconnected information systems and repositories. This results in the situation that we used the data in various capacities, with numerous versions and with disparate meanings, across several different business units. Finally, the analytical products are created and then supported by the analysts who create them. This support model inherently increases the risk to the organisation, through a lack of governance and oversight, and the dependence on key individuals.
What exactly did you like most about Stellar’s service?
We found that Stellar offered fast and effective development of the data product. The consenting data model is one of the more complex systems at the council. However, the Stellar developers gripped it up fast and delivered a great product to the business units.
What are three benefits you’ve experienced as a result of Stellar’s service?
As a first point, I would mention less reliance on our Analytics team to pull ad-hoc data requests. What is also good, is that the business users now have access to more cohesive and reliable datasets. Finally, there is less reliance on one individual to manage the data models.
What was life before you started with the project?
We have relied on one individual for quite a long time. The one person needed to manage and query the consenting data model for the entire organisation and share it with all their peers.
In the data and analytics strategy that Stellar produced they talked about “democratised” analytics. This was a part of that strategy that Stellar worked on with sponsorship from our Growth Funding and Analytics team. Now they are working with us to deliver on the roadmap to get more trusted and reconciled data to more business units. Now all the relevant business units can access the same, trusted information without having to ask an analyst to run queries for them.
What surprised you the most or made you the happiest about Stellar’s service?
The team developed data products extremely fast and effective. I would recommend Stellar’s development services.
