Case study
Consolidated board reporting from a DevOps-built Azure data warehouse
Decipher engaged Interfuze to build an Azure-hosted, DevOps-enabled data warehouse for consolidated reporting and Power BI dashboards. More than a year on, the pragmatic design had held up, and Decipher's own team now supports it.
Outcomes
- Over a year of use and active development on the pragmatic design, with no rework toward the target architecture needed
- Two clicks to run the automated, audited Azure DevOps pipeline that deploys the warehouse and Power BI reports
- Weekly warehouse refreshes from production data
The challenge
Decipher is a software-as-a-service product vendor in the Wesfarmers group, with several products serving many industries and countries. Its cloud platform is used in over 60 countries for mine closure and rehabilitation, tailings storage facilities, precision agriculture and waste monitoring.
Decipher needed a reporting solution that drew on several data sources and could snapshot historic state, to report progress properly to its executive and the WESCEF board. It had to be built on the Azure stack and support both ad hoc and governed reporting, and, as strong believers in DevOps, Decipher wanted its delivery run through DevOps too.
It engaged Interfuze to develop an Azure-hosted, DevOps-enabled data warehouse that would meet the immediate need for consolidated reporting and Power BI dashboards, while leaving room to extend into its broader product set and its IoT plans.
Our approach
An Interfuze consultant drove the engagement from inception to delivery. After inception, workshops with Microsoft and senior members of Decipher's technical team set a best-practice target architecture. Further internal workshops then shaped a more pragmatic interim architecture that meets current requirements and sets Decipher up to evolve to the target.
The implementation team was led by the Interfuze consultant, with a Decipher senior developer and a Decipher reporting specialist to make the handover smooth. It proved the architecture through a deep slice: one critical subscriptions report, delivered end to end.
The solution is a Power BI reporting capability over a modern Azure ELT data warehouse with weekly refreshes from production, a "two-click" automated and audited Azure DevOps pipeline with built-in data quality testing, versioned parallel environments, and as-built documentation, reporting processes and an internal upskill and handover. Significant thought went into balancing the demanding technical requirements of DataOps against Decipher's wish to limit the ongoing support the solution needs.
The outcome
The reporting solution was delivered successfully. At the time of writing it had been in use and active development for well over a year, and the scaled-back, pragmatic design had held up, with no further evolution toward the target architecture yet required.
Decipher's internal team now supports the solution itself.
“We had little experience in DataOps and Azure data architectures so were understandably nervous when we started this journey. Interfuze's methodical, collaborative and transparent approach to the engagement however, helped reassure we were choosing the right path through some difficult decisions. The resulting solution and uplift to our internal capability has left us ready to meet today's reporting needs and face tomorrow's reporting challenges.”
