Supernova Award Category

The Problem

In the fight against cancer, the American Cancer Society uses data and analytics in every facet of the fight. Programs for donors, volunteers, survivors and scientists all depend on data. The data needs to be “fast, fresh & better” to reduce latency and they encourage a culture rich in analytics to help them reach their goal. Their reach is becoming more global because cancer is a global problem. 

Data sources from eleven geographical divisions on donor and volunteer transactions pulled from mobile activity, their inbound National Cancer Information Center, and over 6,000 events they run each year are critical to American Cancer Society operations. They utilize that information to assist their 2,500,000 volunteers on a daily basis and needed to reduce data latency, and make data available for the business to better make decisions.

American Cancer Society realized that providing the foundation for analytics would require integrating these systems.

The Solution

With data contained in multiple locations, and no real data warehouse present, ACS decided to upgrade their older, slower system. Following a 5-month RFP process, Teradata and IBM Netezza participated in a POC to evaluate features, ease of use, administration, product roadmap, and use cases.

Teradata was selected and ACS began a multi-phased implementation with the initial deployment to move the previous data model onto the Teradata platform for speed (migrating from Oracle). Then, they looked at disparate data marts to consolidate 11 geographic organizations onto Teradata – making it easier for doctors to gain access to the data for research; to ultimately find a cure. 

To provide access to fast, self-service analytics, ACS uses Attunity Replicate to continuously transfer data between their Oracle CRM and their Teradata database. They also use Attunity Replicate to migrate their Teradata production box data to the Teradata Cloud environment as part of their disaster recovery plan.

The results

ACS is making it easier for people to find correlations in geography, backgrounds, genome studies, and more. Researchers now are able to conduct visualizations bringing data together for that possible “Ah-ha” moment.

For example, ACS knows that 90% of all colon cancer patients survive if their cancer is found at an early stage, but only 40% of patients are diagnosed early enough, so they need to get people screened more often. ACS gives screening guidance and wants to make it easier to obtain and share news on how to prevent cancer, get well and stay well.

Having quick access to data and answers to questions has facilitated a culture shift within the American Cancer Society with speed and ability to generate more reports faster. The ultimate mission is to use data from studies and research to find a cure for cancer by combining machine learning and analysis. This data may come from geographical locations, the Center for Disease Control, and other sources. For ACS, the path to the future includes Big Data.

The integrated data is also used to improve donor, participant and volunteer experiences. ACS has over 3M volunteers with 96% of their donor dollars coming from individuals. ACS constantly segments consumers and constituents to learn who has moved from donor to participant? Who is a recent survivor? What events are taking place in the area that need participants? What programs are working?

Metrics

Prior to the introduction of the solution, common queries and reports took between 4 and 7 hours to complete, making it very difficult for report writers and analysts to provide meaningful results in acceptable timeframes.  Now, with over 30,000 report queries running per month, 90% of those return data in less than 60 seconds, completely altering the way an analyst retrieves report data.  They are now able to create and run reports interactively, with results reaching them in near real-time versus having to run reports overnight.

Data transfer that prior to the implementation that took 7 hours is now completed in 3 seconds using Attunity Replicate, allowing for intra-day and business activity monitoring rather than having to refresh the entire warehouse overnight.

The sustained average report response differential is 370x faster than prior to the solution, meaning reports are on average completing on a scale that is measured in seconds rather than hours.  On a given report that ran in a 4 to 7 hour duration, the response is now between 30 and 40 seconds. 

Since completing the solution, the American Cancer Society has been able to reduce their report delivery team by 50%, releasing those resources to other parts of the business to more mission focused roles.  This saves Information Technology over $800,000 in resource costs annually, which allows those dollars to directly affect mission programs.

The Technology

Teradata 2700, 4 nodes

Attunity Replicate

Siebel 7.7 on Oracle Databases (version 10g)

Disruptive Factor

The American Cancer Society’s future includes a path to big data. The culture and the belief is that they can finish the fight with more data. The enemy is cancer and being data driven allows ACS to focus valuable energy on the mission and vision.

“So that means a lot more foray into big data than ever before. That also means continued consolidation of data sources that we don't own. So that's things like looking at Center for Disease Control information, geographical information, and correlating that to our existing data sets. Then beyond that, we have to look at better ways to visualize and analyze,” comments Blake Sanders, VP of Architecture & Data Management.

Now, the data scientist is actually making sense of the data and is able to visualize for the other researchers how that correlation occurs. Data visualization as a practice is both an art and a science. Taking hundreds of data points and attributes and actually visualizing that in a way that makes it easy for someone to understand is the silver bullet. For example, being able to see how a patient understands data and how well they could actually get information for their disease out of properties like cancer.org, or visualizing how early cancer prevention helps survivor rates dispels myth that they might come at it with. And, it dispels their fear around the feeling of ‘oh my gosh, I've been diagnosed with cancer, this is it, I'm the victim’. Now the information can show that they can fight and they can win.

Shining Moment

We had an opportunity to participate in this video to discuss how data is benefitting the American Cancer Society.  http://bcove.me/42m4lobk

Prior to adding Attunity Replicate, the solution received Teradata’s EPIC Award for the way it helped change our Marketing Departments workflow and capability.