At CARFAX, a data services company that supplies vehicle history reports to individuals and businesses, accuracy and trustworthiness in their data is paramount, and a modern data architecture is their vehicle for sound decision-making across the company.
Karen White, Director of Business Intelligence, recently led her team’s transformation from a legacy on-prem data warehouse to the cloud. As part of that transition, CARFAX implemented Magpie so that they could have a managed data lake with the flexibility and scalability to support dozens of end users within the company.
THE CARFAX + MAGPIE STORY: DATA TOOLING FOR OUTCOMES
Karen spoke with Silectis’s CEO, Demetri Kotsikopoulos, about what drove the decision to transition and modernize CARFAX’s data architecture, how they pieced it all together, and some of the results and lessons learned.
In listening to the webinar broadcast, it’s important to understand that at CARFAX, the Business Intelligence team and its tools are a central resource to the entire company. Every decision, whether it’s a project or product development, stems from information that comes from within Karen’s team or purview.
As she stated, “the transformation itself was really around trust, accuracy, and getting [our] delivery time down to nothing so [our end users] could do it themselves.”
Karen’s vision was to not only implement state-of-the-art tools so that data accuracy would be high and time to value fast, but also to deliver a self-service model for users around the company, whether within finance, marketing, sales, or another department. Karen describes a “hub and spoke” model, and how valuable it is for her team to be able to put the power of rapid insights into power users across the organization.
To date, CARFAX’s team has about 40 daily users on Magpie, Silectis’ managed data lake platform. They have been able to drastically reduce the number of tickets and requests coming into the BI team, and instead are able to easily get end users up and running on Magpie. Overall, the improved availability of the data and significantly reduced time to insight have fostered a renewed sense of trust within the organization.
To hear more about CARFAX’s experience modernizing their data architecture and implementing a managed data lake, watch the webinar recording here.