Enabling Employee Analytics With a Modern Data Platform for a National Health Insurer

Background

The Human Capital Analytics (HCA) team at one of the largest national health insurers supports HR and business teams with employee data and insights. They use analytics to improve employee performance and help leadership make informed decisions about talent and operations. The team manages the full employee experience lifecycle through data and dashboards.

Challenge

The HCA team faced serious roadblocks:

• Their existing data warehouse couldn’t support analytics needs. New SaaS systems like Workday and Microsoft 365 weren't connected to it.

• Analysts spent too much time manually pulling data from different systems, leading to poor data quality and wasted effort.

• HR couldn't personalize the employee experience, hurting retention and growth efforts in a competitive job market.

• The Cloud wasn't yet approved for HR data, so an on-premises solution was needed first, with a future path to the Cloud.

• The HCA team lacked the skills to build a modern, cloud-ready data warehouse aligned to new enterprise data governance and master data standards.

• COVID-19 made understanding employee sentiment urgent as the workforce shifted to remote work.

Solution

Goal: Build a working data platform quickly — not in months, but weeks — starting with the highest-priority use cases.

Approach:
Productive Edge applied its 5-Week Modern Data Execution Assessment to create an execution-ready blueprint. Through remote workshops with business and IT teams, we helped HCA:

• Define key business processes and data needs

• Prioritize data sources

• Scope master data and data governance needs

• Set security and access requirements

Using these inputs, we delivered:

• An on-premises solution blueprint (Microsoft SQL Server and on-prem data lake)

• A future cloud blueprint (Azure services)

• A phased execution strategy (crawl, walk, run)

• Data ingestion and cleansing plans

• Data governance and DataOps processes to support continuous integration and deployment

In just eight weeks, Productive Edge built the first version of the new data warehouse, focused on COVID-19 employee sentiment use cases.

Results

• Faster insights: Analysts and data scientists now rapidly produce and reuse insights.

• Employee satisfaction: Richer, more personalized employee experiences are helping HR retain and grow talent.

• Executive confidence: HR leaders can respond faster to employee needs and have seen clear benefits of a modern architecture, making them more open to a future cloud migration.

• Operational agility: Data engineers can spin up new, trustworthy datasets faster with DataOps tooling.

• Prepared for the future: The on-premises platform is built for easy transition to Azure when the time is right.