JDRF’s Big Data Management

“We realized we had a ton of software systems,” says Megan Martin, former director of data analysis at JDRF. “We had lots of places to collect and manage data, but it was disjointed. It wasn’t efficient to use the data to answer the strategic questions we wanted to answer.”

Having so many systems in so many different places made it difficult to pull everything together. JDRF had reports everywhere, Martin says. Every system had its own report, staffers kept their own Excel files and some people were looking at different reports, leading to confusion. For instance, one person may have been looking at an older report that was filtered to show just U.S. donors, while her colleague was looking at an ­updated report that included international support.