Brinks Home's Strategic IT Initiatives: Quarterly Highlights (Part 1 of 5) Microsoft Fabric Data Lake

As we wrap up Q2 at Brinks Home I’m sharing a series of articles on some of the great projects we’re working on that we don’t typically talk about. This was a very important quarter for Brinks Home Information Technology. We took the time to focus on tackling some technical efforts that put us in a position to be successful going forward.

The five efforts I’ll highlight form a significant set of core components for our business. These systems are absolutely critical to our success, and I want to recognize the team members and partners who have supported us in these efforts. In addition to improving our technical footing, we also saved well north of $1 million in software expenses!

We talk a lot at Brinks Home about the partnership between business and IT. It’s another level of partnership when the business participates fully in systematic efforts like these that are focused on essential IT improvements. These projects demonstrate that level of team support.

Project 1: Implementation of Microsoft Fabric Data Lake

The first project we’ll examine is Brinks Home’s implementation of a Microsoft Fabric data lake. This was a massive effort for Brinks Home. We’ve had an active data lake in place for more than four years. It’s central to our management of the business. So why would we want to disrupt and take on such a difficult project? We didn’t take on the effort lightly. The more central these assets became to the business, the more the cracks in our architecture began to show. Ultimately, we decided to embrace the challenge for three main reasons:

We couldn’t keep up! Brinks Home has invested in data. We have a team of excellent data resources. No matter what we do, however, demand for data exceeds capacity for development. We recognized that our current architecture, while very powerful, bottlenecks us on the data engineering team. We initially tried to expand that skill set and train additional team members on data engineering in Py Spark, but we could see that this was a long road. Microsoft Fabric simplifies the data engineering functions. Primary data engineering in Fabric is done in SQL. All our Business Intelligence team members can participate in the management of their pipelines.  Engineering as a function isn’t going away, but we have expanded the pool. We have the entire team participating in this effort, and even though it’s early, we are absolutely seeing the benefits of this approach. We hoped to see a 20-30% efficiency improvement in data projects, and that appears to be obtainable based on the progress we’ve seen.

Inconsistent. Our business partners voiced concerns that it was frustrating when our data was different from scorecard to scorecard. As we implement Fabric, we put in place a modern medallion architecture designed to standardize our management of data. This is designed to create standardization from scorecard to scorecard, which now just reflects visualizations of gold-level data. We’ve also put effort into building out data governance using Microsoft Purview. This allows us to document glossary terms, the rules associated with those terms, the tables and data sources that feed those business rules, and where in Tableau those terms are used.

Difficult to test. In our previous architecture, we had automated monitoring on the pipelines. It was, however, extremely difficult to test data either looking for statistical anomalies or missing data. Since our business rules were a hybrid of our data lake and Tableau Prep flows the full picture was only available in the visualization. Our new implementation solves this problem, creating a testable gold layer that can be managed with statistical tests.

A big shoutout to Valent Partners , our implementation partner. This has been an exciting adventure and I’m thrilled with the partnership! Thanks Jeff Hilliard Philip Bredehoeft Scott Schwarz, Nathan Groeschel James Herd and Daniel Lozano

I want to recognize our partners at Microsoft Fabric who have been there with us through this entire effort. Brinks Home was early into Fabric. Our initial work was actually done in the Microsoft preview environment! Microsoft has been a partner through it all Mikhiel Advani Viji Somasundaram and our account team David Barrow & Tammy Garlick .

The entire Brinks Home data team has skilled up in Microsoft Fabric: @Mikhail Blakely @Leslie Chandler Silviana Villarruel Amy Reynolds Emily Kim (Nguyen) Kylie Yoo Drew Fingerhut Pallavi s Harsha Reedy Digvijaysinh Gohil Bryan Glickstein John S. Indu Yerramreddy William Yoakum Javier Saldaña Jr., MBA, MSDS na Murad Nabizade Ajibola Ajia .  Jared Flores with Data flow provided much needed assistance. Special shout out to Colin Gick who has the vision to kick this effort off!

Finally, I want to acknowledge our leadership team at Brinks Home who gave us the space and grace to make this huge pivot. Our commitment to you is that we will go faster and cleaner into the future! Robert (Bob) Reedy Thomas Kim Dinesh Kalwani Veronica Moturi Jonah Serie Sara Harshbarger Tsvetoslav (Sava) Tsvetkov, CFA Rick Sheets, SET Ken Chuney and teams.

In the following posts in this series, I’ll highlight other key technical projects that the IT team at Brinks Home drove this quarter.

#SecurityIT #InformationTechnology #SecurityIndustry #Data #TechnicalDebt