Powering Mercy Corps Unified Cloud Data Analytics Using Fabric Platform

At Mercy Corps, we tirelessly seek solutions to the world’s toughest problems. We approach every challenge with questions: What are the most critical needs in the communities where we work? How can we help meet them? And how can innovation be part of the answer? Mercy Corps is a global team of humanitarians working together on the front lines of today’s biggest crises to create a future of possibility, where everyone can prosper. Our mission: to alleviate suffering, poverty, and oppression by helping people build secure, productive, and just communities. In more than 40+ countries around the world, over 6,000+ team members work side by side with people living through poverty, disaster, violent conflict, and the acute impacts of climate change. We’re committed to creating global change through local impact — 95% of our team members are from the countries where they work.

In the fast-paced and global realm of humanitarian organizations, the strategic fusion of digital innovation and artificial intelligence (AI) has emerged as a game-changing approach to drive operational efficiency and amplify mission-driven outcomes. This document presents a distinctive overview of Mercy Corps' unified cloud data analytics solution, a pioneering implementation that harnesses the power of the Fabric Analytics platform, underpinned by Microsoft Cloud. Our solution is designed around the utilization of Spark Notebooks and Fabric Dataflows Gen2 for streamlined data transformation processes. Complementing these components, our architecture incorporates Data Lakehouse's employing the Medallion architecture, which ensures robust data quality management, storage, modeling capabilities and predictive analytics. This architecture supports data organization and enables scalability and flexible data modeling, which is crucial for modern data analytics.

By strategically incorporating additional features such as Co-Pilot and Azure Data AI, we plan to dynamically scale up the predictive analytics model to handle data science workloads within the Fabric environment. This scalability is a testament to the adaptability and futureproofing of our technology, enabling our organization to process and analyze vast volumes of data efficiently. This, in turn, facilitates informed decision-making and strategic planning initiatives. As a result, Mercy Corps Global IT Services team developed an ITOperations (ITOps) data scoring criteria and models that will enable predictive insights generation and data-driven decision support.

Furthermore, our solution seamlessly integrates with business intelligence tools such as Power BI, facilitating intuitive data visualization and analysis for end-users. This accessibility empowers stakeholders across our organization to derive actionable insights from the wealth of data generated by our unified cloud data analytics platform. During this summit, we will showcase the architecture, implementation, and operationalization of our unified cloud analytics platform using the ICT Operations Framework design architecture patterns. We will also discuss the technical challenges faced and the innovative strategies employed to overcome them.

By sharing our experiences and best practices, we aim to inspire other organizations to embrace digital innovation and AI as transformative catalysts for advancing their mission-driven objectives, and to highlight how AI and digital innovation can transform any sector – including the humanitarian sector. Through collaborative knowledge-sharing and innovation, we believe that the humanitarian sector can unlock new avenues of impact and effectively address the complex challenges of our time.