Although the data lake offers new capabilities and possibilities for analytics discovery and decision making, at the same time it introduces a plethora of new technology, tooling, and development approaches as part of a rapidly evolving solution landscape. This presentation discusses how at Health Care Service Corporation (HCSC), by following proven and time-honored data management guiding principles and best practices, we are overcoming these challenges as we build out and mature our data lake environment as a part of our enterprise analytics and business intelligence (BI) ecosystem.

The presentation covers how Information Technology (IT) at HCSC collaborates with business data resources and data stewards to help evolve our data lake including:

• Eliciting business requirements for the data lake, followed by validating their implementation as part of user acceptance criteria and testing, to measure and evaluate the success of meeting business expectations and results
• Fostering business data resource and data steward buy in and support through frequent communications and status updates, including validation of how developing solutions fit together within the existing data ecosystem
• Proving out capabilities, needs, and requirements, including non-functional requirements expectations, through Pilots, POCs, and User Acceptance Testing embedded into development execution plans
• Planning for controlled Self-Service BI across the entire enterprise analytics and BI ecosystem, to ensure trusted data discovery that performs well