Richard Hanna is an Information Analyst on the Data Visualisation Centre of Expertise (COE), a part of the Data & Intelligent Systems (DIS) and has been with the company since 2004, having had exposure to a variety of teams and roles across the years. In his current role his team provides Business Intelligence Solutions across the Allstate Enterprise, through Power BI, Tableau, Business Objects, Analysis for office and SSAS OLAP. But Richard's specific role is focused on managing Power BI, the latest Data Visualisation offering from Microsoft.
The Data Visualisation COE supports a wide range of applications, with a variety of far reaching projects across Allstate as a whole. Business Objects and Tableau are the two best known applications they support. There are over 50,000 Allstate employees and agents who use Business Objects and 15,000 employees who interact with Tableau. The teams projects are wide ranging from general infrastructure upgrades, designing new environments, supporting existing users, on boarding new user groups as well as the development of reports and dashboards.
In Richards own words,
"I love working with data and to have a job where I get to work with data and visualise it for end users is a bonus."
Richard has worked on all of the technologies that his team support during his 16 years at Allstate NI, but he has found SSAS OLAP and Power BI to be the most interesting. SSAS OLAP support is more development driven, working with data stewards to provide the correct updates to the OLAP Cubes periodically. Power BI is new to Allstate and since 2019 he has found himself at the forefront of it. As it is still a relatively new entry into the Data Visualisation space he have enjoyed exploring the tool, putting all the pieces together for our users and working with a variety of Allstate business areas to onboard them with Power BI.
"The Power BI project I am working on currently is very exciting. I am enjoying the challenges of working with an application that is evolving and gathering momentum in the data visualisation space. In the last 16 months the application has gone from a POC to being rolled out to almost 400 developers and 1000+ end users across Allstate. Power BI is a member of the Office 365 cloud which means that it is a perfect complement to existing Office 365 tools that are used within the company. Hindsight will always tell us that there are ways we could have done it differently, but it was all a learning process for myself and the team."
