Major Investment Bank
Stabilized a failing multi-platform analytics environment and transformed it into a strategic enterprise capability
26→10
Hrs/Week
Best
Upgrade Ever
18+
Month Partnership
Overview
A major investment bank's analytics platform was in crisis. Reloads failed multiple times per month. Platform upgrades caused outages. There was no pre-production environment, forcing development against live production data. Evil Genius embedded a senior technical architect to stabilize the platform, build the missing infrastructure, and transform analytics from a liability into a strategic capability — then gradually stepped back as the internal team built confidence.
The Situation
The bank's analytics platform spanned multiple technologies — legacy and modern BI, cloud, alerting, and automated report distribution — but nobody was managing it as a unified estate. Reloads failed multiple times per month. Every platform upgrade historically caused outages. All licenses were misconfigured. There was no pre-production environment, so developers worked directly against live production data. Hundreds of legacy documents were earmarked for migration, but there was no assessment framework to prioritize them. The internal team had the domain expertise but lacked the technical architecture support to stabilize and scale.
Our Approach
- 1
Embedded a senior technical architect to work alongside the internal team — not to replace them, but to complete their capabilities. Started at 26 hours per week, addressing the most critical stability issues first.
- 2
Restored reload stability through targeted infrastructure changes, eliminating the multiple-failures-per-month pattern that had been disrupting data delivery across the organization.
- 3
Designed and deployed a pre-production environment, giving developers a safe space to build and test without risking production data or availability.
- 4
Implemented custom security frameworks across all platforms — legacy BI, modern BI, cloud, alerting, and automated report distribution — creating unified governance for the first time.
- 5
Led the first platform upgrade that didn't cause an outage — described internally as 'the most successful ever.' Gradually reduced engagement intensity from 26 to 10 hours per week as the platform stabilized and the internal team built confidence and capability.
Results
- Platform upgrade described as 'the most successful ever' — prior upgrades caused outages
- Reload stability restored — from multiple failures per month to consistent, reliable operation
- Pre-production environment designed and deployed for safe development
- Custom security framework implemented across all platforms
- Support hours reduced from 26/week to 10/week as the platform stabilized
- Platform expanded both vertically and horizontally to meet growing demand
- Internal team described the engagement as completing 'the expertise of the COE team'
What This Made Possible
Analytics went from a liability to a strategic platform. The internal team now manages day-to-day operations with confidence. The reduced support hours demonstrate the Evil Genius philosophy: build capacity, not dependency. The organization is now positioned to migrate hundreds of legacy documents and expand into cloud — from a position of stability instead of crisis. The engagement continues not because the client can't function without it, but because the value keeps compounding.
Facing a Similar Challenge?
Let's talk about what's in your analytics portfolio — and what it would take to get it where it needs to be.