“Solving an IT challenge can sometimes be like solving a puzzle—bringing disparate pieces together and then finding the proper place for each piece. What was once a jumble then becomes clear and whole.”

Challenges

The key to solving a business puzzle is understanding how the final product is supposed to work, leveraging the right internal resources, and supplementing those where necessary with the right outside help. Helping solve business technology puzzles is a core competency at Celsior, which assisted Fidelity & Guaranty Life (FGL) in creating an enterprise data store, a centralized data hub. Elements included incorporating data architecture from one vendor, policy information from another, and quality tools from a third. The result is a central storage facility with clean data that can help FGL make better business decisions.

“This was a complex, time-intensive, and resource-intensive project, and one we knew would require outside help,” says Sanjeev Singh, Chief Information Officer at Fidelity & Guaranty Life. “Celsior was with us from the beginning, helping us to understand the project better from an IT standpoint, incorporating the various data sources and feeds, and turning that data into actionable intelligence.”

Clean, actionable data goal for enterprise data store

Iowa-based Fidelity & Guaranty Life has more than 700,000 policyholders for its annuity and life insurance products. An enterprise data store had long been an IT objective to replace a more haphazard storage system that had evolved over the years. “The goal was to understand the data and get a clear account as to who is the recipient and to reduce data redundancy,” says Singh. To work as envisioned, the data store required an overall architecture, supported by data inputs and data cleaning with the ability to do deep dives for data mining purposes. Downstream uses for the data include finance, marketing, and agent commissions. Singh operates with a small internal IT team, and he knew the scope and time required to complete this project would outstrip his internal resources. Based on a positive working relationship with Celsior, he requested a bid for the work and sought the necessary approvals to get started.

FGL was using an existing data architecture devised by PwC. The project also needed to incorporate a data feed from NTT Data and data cleaning and analytics tools from Informatica. Key challenges included bringing disparate data sources and tools together in the enterprise data store, then cleaning the data to remove duplicates and allow data scientists to answer big data questions from the store.

Great team to work with

Celsior uses both domestic and offshore resources working in tandem to keep projects moving forward on schedule. Daily and weekly communications between the Celsior team, Singh, and the FGL team helped ensure delivery deadlines were met. The lengthy project has been complete for about a year and is already delivering high-quality intelligence to FGL while allowing quicker and more convenient data retrieval. Celsior continues to support the enterprise data store for maintenance and the addition of further functionality.

“The Celsior team is great to work with,” Singh says. “From the data architects to the developers and everyone in between, everyone is laser-focused on delivering a high-quality project in a timely manner. Any issues are addressed immediately, another reason Celsior is my go-to resource for IT development and implementation projects.”