Three merged housing associations, one lakehouse, £4.2m unlocked.
A G15-member housing group, newly formed from a three-way merger, needed a single data operating model. In 14 months we consolidated 48 source systems onto a Databricks lakehouse, retired three overlapping BI estates, and unlocked £4.2m of three-year savings.
Three providers, three stacks, one regulator.
Following a three-way merger, the group had three QL / Capita / MRI estates, three BI teams (Power BI, Tableau, Qlik), and three operating models. TSM reporting required manual consolidation; damp-and-mould analytics were impossible at group level.
Databuzz was brought in — after two previous consultancies had stalled — to land a single operating model and an executable platform.
Strategy first, then migrate domain-by-domain.
8-week strategy
Target operating model, vendor selection, costed 18-month roadmap, board sign-off.
Foundation (months 1–3)
Databricks lakehouse, governance, identity, CI/CD, data-product templates.
Domain migration (months 3–12)
48 sources onboarded across tenancy, assets, repairs, finance, HR. Parallel-run, analyst enablement.
BI rationalisation (months 6–14)
Three BI platforms → Power BI on semantic layer. 72 curated dashboards retired to 28.
Governance & adoption (months 12–14)
Stewardship, TSM automation, regulator-ready evidence pack.
Outcomes, 14 months in.
Licence consolidation, batch-window savings, analyst productivity.
BI and DW consolidation; Databricks replacing legacy MPP.
Re-engineered pipelines; incremental processing on Delta Lake.
RSH visit cleared; TSM evidence automated.
Quarterly programme reviews.
Measured on time-to-insight baseline.