National Services Scotland

With the Denodo Platform, we’ve been able to shift from a traditional waterfall process, based on a physical data warehouse, to a more agile process built around a logical data warehouse. We can now analyze, design, and build in parallel, rather than consecutively.

Neil Sinclair Business Intelligence Technical Lead

National Services Scotland (NSS) delivers healthcare-related services as a national board of Scotland’s broader National Health Service (NHS). Comprised of over 3,000 employees, NSS provides critical data, in the form of management information and business intelligence (BI), to over 10,000 users across NHS Scotland and the wider public sector.

For many years, NSS delivered data via a traditional data warehouse, but over time, the organization needed to improve data integration speeds, reduce latency, and streamline the infrastructure’s ability to accommodate new sources and other changes. For this reason, NSS leveraged the Denodo Platform to establish a logical data warehouse, which uses data virtualization to provide real time data integration without physically moving any data.

Faster Speeds and Increased Agility

The new logical data warehouse was implemented right alongside the existing physical data warehouse. In fact, to the logical data warehouse, the physical data warehouse is simply another data source, ripe for real-time data access through data virtualization.

With the logical data warehouse in place, NSS achieved its vision of a faster, more efficient, and more agile data infrastructure that would accelerate new-project development. New projects include an enhanced cancer intelligence platform; a persons-at-risk dataset, for use by local authorities and government agencies in times of emergency; a national radiology dashboard; and a national finance platform for NHS Scotland, integrating data from existing procurement, finance, workforce and activity data to present a single finance view.