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Wood Mackenzie Collaborates with AWS Resident Architect to Drive Greater Insights from its Energy Data

2022

AWS Data Lab
Wood Mackenzie

Challenge

A key element of the Wood Mackenzie business model includes integrating new and disparate data sets related to the Energy industry. In late 2021, Wood Mackenzie engaged an AWS Data Lab Resident Architect to review its data and analytics strategy, develop data architecture principles, and enhance its understanding of how to build and scale data architecture solutions for its data platform.

Solution

In addition to supporting the creation of data architecture principles and a design review process, the Resident Architect worked with the extended Wood Mackenzie architecture team to fully understand the challenges and current state of the energy data landscape. The Resident Architect recognized that disparate data sets would make data governance challenging and proposed a distributed architecture (data mesh), instead of a centralized data lake, to implement it. Wood Mackenzie is now exploring a range of options, including data mesh architectures, to modernize and redesign its entire application portfolio. Together, by building on the Resident Architect’s expertise as an AWS architect, the Wood Mackenzie/Resident Architect engagement has created a range of scalable, resilient, and cost-efficient implementation patterns, as well as cultivated a culture of modern data architecture literacy through knowledge sharing and working sessions for Wood Mackenzie and the larger organization.

Benefit

The result of this work included technical enablement with customized Immersion Days to empower architects and engineers to break down data silos within Wood Mackenzie, standardized design review and architecture guidelines leading to better-designed solutions across the organization, and the creation of repeatable design patterns. These improvements have resulted in more efficient data pipelines and workloads, leading to high-quality and robust data sets for customers and analysts to support Wood Mackenzie in its journey to transform how they power the planet. 

“Our Resident Architect has helped with both tactical items and served as a sounding board as we develop our internal data architecture strategy. Their presence in meetings has been met with comments ranging from ‘I didn’t know AWS had architects that could review our workloads’ to ‘this is really cool.’ Having a Resident Architect has helped us make the most of all of the AWS resources we have and has been a positive feedback cycle into how we build going forward.” 

Liz Dennett, Ph.D., VP of Data Architecture, Wood Mackenzie

  • AWS Services Used
  • About Wood Mackenzie

  • Wood Mackenzie, a Verisk business, is a global research and consultancy business powering the energy industry. For nearly 50 years, they have worked closely with their customers to provide the data, analytics, and insights they rely on to inspire their decision making and transform how they power the planet.

  • About AWS Resident Architect

  • The AWS Data Lab Resident Architect program provides AWS customers with guidance in refining and executing their data strategy and solutions roadmap. Resident Architects are dedicated to customers for 6 months, with opportunities for extension, and help customers (Chief Data Officers, VPs of Data Architecture, and Builders) make informed choices and tradeoffs about accelerating their data and analytics workloads and implementation.

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