South African cloud solution provider InfoVerge has demonstrated its acumen in data management, analytics and AI after committing to a technically complex project to merge over 80 disparate data sources into a unified data warehouse for SA Tourism.
SA Tourism is the tourism marketing arm of the South African government. Its core business is to promote the country domestically and internationally, and data plays a critical role in its operation.
The project, still ongoing, has shown how the effective fusion of data sources enhances reporting efficiency, analytical capabilities and the sophistication of trend analyses, thereby allowing for proactive, calculated adjustments in tourism strategies and tactics.
“South African Tourism had a very pressing issue regarding centralising all their data into one platform to make sure that they can facilitate the data management through a single point of the truth, and that is to make tourism data available for analysis and also for integration with other systems,” said Ntiyiso Mayile, chief data officer at InfoVerge.
Most of the organisation’s data was stored in multiple environments, including third-party environments, in a very unstructured way.
It was also not classified, added Mayile, and often submitted in multiple formats.
Meta-driven data ingestion
To address these issues, InfoVerge was contracted to implement a meta-driven data ingestion process, based on the use of a flexible and integrated storage platform.
The service provider also mobilised its Microsoft Cloud Platform, along with its automated extract, transform and load (ETL) system, to ensure effective data storage, data quality controls, classification and data cleansing.
“They also had to facilitate data governance and compliance with the central authority,” Mayile added.
While InfoVerge SA set about executing its data storage, compliance and ingestion process, the second deliverable – of equal importance – was to build a new warehouse to accommodate the centralised data.
InfoVerge SA impressed SA Tourism with its project delivery methodology and its technical methodology.
“There are multiple ways an organisation of this stature would select a preferred supplier. In addition to evaluating delivery methodology, they will then consider capacity, capability and competency of the types of resources that you have. We have always had the confidence to say ‘we will be able to do the work’,” said Mayile.
Desmond Mathebula, Lead: Data and Security Implementation at SA Tourism, said from the outset he was impressed with the approach taken by InfoVerge to understand and undertake the project.
“The first thing that was done was to do a full assessment of our environment based on the project scope – because the project scope was to ensure that we build an effective data services platform. Then we had to deal with the issue of visualisations – where we are engaging all the business users who are going to be consuming the data from the data services platform itself. InfoVerge explored what governance we have in place, which is a very good start, and what are the frameworks in existence, which will touch on the data services provisioning. They highlighted what it is that we do have, what is still missing and who is going to be responsible for ensuring that we close the gaps which they identify,” said Mathebula.
He stressed the importance of understanding who would be responsible to manage the project and the data services platform.
“You need somebody who understands the data services platform, as well as a project manager, so that they can be a full alignment on the technical guidance as well as how the project needs to unfold. So those were a few challenges that we had. But after resolving those specific challenges and reporting back to the project sponsors, fortunately enough, we had very good project sponsors who understood when we had the challenges that we had. Then, after addressing all those issues, we managed to move very quickly.
“I can say I am impressed by the fact that InfoVerge managed to scale the resources, meaning the people allocated into the project, to ensure that they do cover for the time that we've lost as well.”
As a result of this strategic partnership, SA Tourism has cemented its position as a leading digital-first tourism services provider.
InfoVerge is hosting a webinar on 6 November to explore the intricate processes and cutting-edge technology driving successful data integration.
The webinar offers an opportunity for delegates to understand how analytics has been deployed to enable superior decision-making processes in the high-growth tourism sector, and how actionable insights and trend forecasting derived from centralised data are expanding SA Tourism’s global footprint.
To register for the webinar, click here.
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