Places for People and The Dot Collective have developed a cloud-native data platform which brings together data from diverse sources, including housing management systems, financial data and tenant information, into a single source of the truth for analytics, reporting and operations.
Places for People’s data platform is built on Google Cloud Platform. For data ingestion, Cloud Run and Datastream enable the flow of data into the data lake on Google Cloud Storage, structured according to a ‘medallion’ architecture. This setup, combined with Iceberg, allows BigQuery to directly query the data lake, creating a powerful data ‘lakehouse’ environment.
A structured architecture design within BigQuery, including modelling, business and presentation layers, supports complex data analytics. Looker Core serves as a semantic layer for business users to create custom dashboards and Looker Studio Pro enables the development of comprehensive dashboards that integrate both data from within and outside the platform. Tools such as Cloud Monitoring, Dataplex and IAM are used for data processing, governance, security, monitoring and logging capabilities.
Within six months, Places for People has reduced its IT costs by £1.5 million, cut its FTE data-processing time by 30 per cent and carried out thousands of extra maintenance jobs.
Rob Gallagher, CDO, Places for People, said, “The Dot Collective has been a valuable partner in our data transformation. Its technical expertise and agile approach have accelerated our progress and enabled us to make significant strides.”
Svetlana, CEO, The Dot Collective, said, “It’s been an incredibly satisfying journey with Places for People. Not only have we enabled its data strategy to have a huge business impact, but I feel we’ve played a pivotal role in helping it to become a more data-driven organisation.”
