Places for People: Building a Data Platform for the Future
Places for People, a leading UK social enterprise, sought to revolutionise its operations. Their vision was to harness the power of data to enhance efficiency, reduce costs, and ultimately improve the lives of their tenants.
However, their fragmented and inaccessible data landscape posed a significant challenge. Without a unified data source, decision-making was hindered, and performance tracking was inefficient.
Author
Rob Lawrence
Chief Revenue Officer
Rob drives the company's revenue growth through marketing, sales operations, business development and channel partnerships. Previously he has founded and exited a consumer business before gaining over ten years of sales leadership experience across software product, services, and managed services where he has learnt to excel in driving growth with enterprise clients. Rob is committed to building a team that collaborates effectively with channel partners, amplifying The Dot Collective's voice, enabling us to help more organisations be successful with data. He holds several Microsoft data engineering and science certifications and a BSc in Applied Science. A former Captain in the Parachute Regiment, Rob is also a dedicated father and triathlete, where he has represented his Age Group for Team GB.
To overcome these obstacles, Places for People partnered with The Dot Collective. Together, they embarked on a journey to build a robust, cloud-native data platform. This platform consolidated data from diverse sources, including property management systems, financial data, and tenant information, into a single source of truth.
Places for People’s data platform is built on Google Cloud Platform (GCP), utilising a suite of native GCP tools toa deliver a robust, scalable solution. For data ingestion, Cloud Run and Datastreamisleveraged to enable seamless data flow into the data lake on Google Cloud Storage (GCS), structured according to a medallion architecture. This setup, combined with Iceberg, allows BigQuery to directly query the data lake, creating a powerful data lakehouse environment.
Within BigQuery, a structured architecture design that includes modeled, business, and presentation layers supports complex analytical requirements. Looker Core serves as a semantic layer, empowering business users to create custom dashboards, while Looker Studio Pro facilitates the development of comprehensive dashboards that integrate both data within and outside the platform.
This unified data view enables business users to make informed, data-driven decisions with full traceability back to the source. Additionally, tools like Cloud Monitoring, Dataplex, and IAM are employed to ensure robust data processing, governance, security, monitoring, and logging capabilities across the platform, further enhancing reliability and compliance.
The impact of this transformation was swift and substantial. Within six months, Places for People achieved:
- Reduced IT costs by £1.5 million.
- Improved budgetary control over repairs and maintenance.
- Enabled thousands of additional maintenance jobs.
- Reduced FTE data processing time by 30%.
- Provided real-time, trusted data for informed decision-making.
Svetlana, CEO of The Dot Collective, played a pivotal role in driving this success. As she puts it, “It’s been an incredibly satisfying journey with Places for People. Not only have we enabled their data strategy to have huge business impact, but I feel like we’ve played a pivotal roll in helping them evolve their culture to become a more data driven organisation”
Places for People echoed this sentiment, as Rob Gallagher, CDOnoted,"The Dot Collective has been a valuable partner in our data transformation. Their technical expertise and agile approach have accelerated our progress and enabled us to make significant strides."
Learn more about this successful data transformation from BigDataLondon 2024 presentation:
This partnership exemplifies the power of collaboration between innovative organisations and skilled technology providers. By leveraging data and advanced analytics, Places for People is well-positioned to continue its mission of providing quality housing and services to its tenants.
Author
Rob Lawrence
Chief Revenue Officer
Rob drives the company's revenue growth through marketing, sales operations, business development and channel partnerships. Previously he has founded and exited a consumer business before gaining over ten years of sales leadership experience across software product, services, and managed services where he has learnt to excel in driving growth with enterprise clients. Rob is committed to building a team that collaborates effectively with channel partners, amplifying The Dot Collective's voice, enabling us to help more organisations be successful with data. He holds several Microsoft data engineering and science certifications and a BSc in Applied Science. A former Captain in the Parachute Regiment, Rob is also a dedicated father and triathlete, where he has represented his Age Group for Team GB.