Data-Driven Future for Education Services

Centralized data management transformed educational services in Texas, improving efficiency, data quality, and customer relationships.

CASE STUDY

4-MINUTE READ

Centralized data management in Texas education services enhances data quality and operational efficiency for school districts, improving customer relationships

The Challenge at Hand

As an education service provider to school districts in the state of Texas, this customer’s mission is to promote educational excellence for Texas schoolchildren through advocacy, visionary leadership, and high-quality services for school districts. The fundamental data for this organization describes consumers (school district school boards), contacts (who are the members per school district), facilities, and purchased products & services. School districts are becoming increasingly data-rich, and increased data is a breeding ground for data quality issues. Data originating from CRM systems had inconsistent and incomplete consumer information. District buyers could not be identified, and consumer relationships could not be established. This customer was missing key revenue opportunities as functional areas operated with complete autonomy, and there were no global standards to meet the specific enterprise requirements. Without centralized and standardized product information, account representatives could not see a given consumer’s purchased product/services portfolio. Broken processes remained broken as there was no mechanism to report or enforce strategic behavior. This education service provider initiated a journey to improve enterprise data access, information quality, and operational efficiency.

Innovative Solutions Unleashed

For the first time, this organization had a centralized and standardized solution to create and manage product and service information, providing better visibility for their organization's specific products and services. Quality-curated data enabled increased business opportunities and increased customer value. Increased data management and transparency allowed them to monitor their data sources and ensure better data quality, such as accurate contact information for school districts and correct mailing addresses for the multitude of buildings that comprise the large school district.

Better data management (through technology, processes, and people) bettered their relationship with consumers and allowed for increased business opportunities by providing accurate and up-to-date data to all internal representatives. By implementing a data governance program, responsibility and ownership were shared equally among the different functional areas and the enterprise. There was a point of control, but each functional area still owned their selective decisions and activities. The organizational benefit from these solutions allows them to:

Demonstrate compliance more easily. 
Modernize core applications and business processes (ERP, CRM, HR, etc.). 
Share benefits of data governance and enhancements across business units. 
Be more efficient in operating the core businesses. 
Improve data quality for revenue transactional reporting.
Improve communications to achieve more accurate product descriptions on the website.

Transformative Results Achieved

D3Clarity assisted this educator and service provider with increasing their effectiveness with school districts and, ultimately, students by improving their interpretation and use of managed data. With the goal of providing valuable insight into their enterprise data and resolving contact data quality issues, Tibco’s EBX platform was selected. A Customer Master Data Management (MDM) solution was built to curate consumer contact data. Data from TASB’s source CRM system were set to be augmented with enriched contact information. Business processes were created that enabled both curation and updates to occur in a governed fashion, effectively allowing the management of data in near real-time within its own organization. A product catalog was developed to link a relationship between what products were purchased by what consumers.

D3Clarity took the lead on the implementation and provided the customer with techniques to manage a full-scale development project for future endeavors. Increasing the data and systems integrations managed by MDM reduced the amount of manual data management, improved data quality through automated validations, and improved organizational efficiency and service quality. D3Clarity earned the right to be the organization’s premier data partner by assisting in the implementation to build trust in their core business information through consistent usage and high-quality data.

Providing the ability for well-managed data opened the door to establishing an enterprise governance program. The use of data and technology enabled individuals to engage and address consumers’ existing and emerging needs. With this system in place, this organization took its first steps into a data-driven future, opening the door to many more uses for the valuable data stored within the organization.