Global Business School Improves Decision Making and Prepares for New Era of AI

The Client

One of the world’s leading educational institutions, serving a diverse student body around the globe with a specialization in master’s degrees, executive education, and online courses.

The Challenge

One of the institution’s biggest challenges was its employees’ limited ability to make informed decisions as a result of siloed, inconsistent and inaccurate data. Departments were using their own tools, many of which were outdated or unsupported.

For the Marketing and Brand team, this meant that reporting took seven hours, with team members having to manually pull data from three different platforms, and combine it in spreadsheets, before being able to analyze it. As a result, the team only reported on a quarterly basis, which limited its ability to respond to market changes, test campaigns, and make ongoing improvements to optimize budget spend and successfully attract new students.

The Journey

When a new Chief Technology Officer joined the institution, he had a clear mission: “to enable our staff to leverage data to drive decisions and create better experiences for all our customers.”

Ensono was asked to design a new data architecture for the institution. Rather than jumping straight into solutions, we started by listening. We ran 18 workshops with over 60 staff members, from senior leaders to hands-on analysts. Each conversation helped us understand the frustrations, hopes, and goals of the people who rely on this data every day.

Together, we shaped a new approach to managing and using data. A central team would take care of the tools and ensure the data was accurate, while individual departments would focus on using that data to improve their work.

We introduced a multi-layered Medallion Data Lakehouse architecture to organize data in three layers:

For raw information
For clean, checked data
For tailored datasets that departments can use for their specific needs

This setup enables teams to get the data they need—when they need it—without worrying about the technical side.

The marketing and brand team was chosen to lead the pilot. Their work depends heavily on data, and they were eager to move faster and smarter.

The Outcomes

With this new approach to data management, the marketing team no longer needs to manually prepare data for reporting. 17 manual steps were eliminated from the data preparation workflow, and as a result:

The marketing team has always-on access to continuously updating reports. These provide real-time insights and enable the team to respond and optimize advertising placements as often as needed.
Collaboration has improved across departments, thanks to a unified and trusted data system.
The school now has the foundation for the broader adoption of analytics and AI across the institution.

Technologies Used:

Azure Data Factory
Azure Data Lake Storage
Databricks
Great Expectations
Microsoft Fabric

Other teams across the institution are now preparing to adopt the same approach. With access to clean, current data and tools that are centrally managed, they’ll be able to use insights more effectively to attract new students and improve services.

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