Highmark Health Cuts Migration Scope by 49% in Dataiku Transformation
200 Users, 3,000+ Workflows: How Highmark Health Navigated a Migration to Dataiku
The Challenge
Highmark Health, an integrated payer-provider system including Blue Cross Blue Shield plans and Allegheny Health Network, set out to modernize its analytics with a strategic move to Google Cloud.
However, key obstacles stood in the way:
- A legacy, desktop-based self-service analytics platform had created deep technical debt
- Over 200 users operated in isolated environments with workflows stored on network drives, which were ungoverned, undocumented, and often abandoned
- Leadership lacked visibility into data usage, workflow dependencies, and business-critical assets
- Performance bottlenecks prevented analysis of large datasets, limiting insight generation
- Rising costs from the incumbent vendor came with minimal innovation
- Decentralized tooling conflicted with the cloud-first vision leadership expected to deliver
With a contract renewal approaching, Highmark needed more than a platform swap. They needed a clear and actionable strategy to reduce complexity and accelerate adoption of their new cloud-native environment.
Our Approach
Aimpoint Digital partnered with Highmark Health to execute a strategic, user-centered migration from their legacy analytics platform to Dataiku. This began with a comprehensive two-week assessment to establish the true scope of the journey. The assessment inventoried 3,126 workflows across server and desktop environments, categorized them by complexity, identified key usage patterns and personas within the organization, and surfaced critical migration risks – including a heavy reliance on corporate shared drives that would require users to fundamentally change how they stored and accessed data.
By the end of the assessment, Aimpoint had narrowed the scope (and corresponding manual effort required) by 49% through inventory triage and de-duplication, giving Highmark's leadership the clarity and confidence they needed to commit resources and move forward in the migration effort.
From there, Aimpoint activated a parallel enablement and migration strategy designed to transfer ownership to Highmark's user community rather than create an ongoing dependency on consultants.
A seven-week hands-on training and enablement program, tailored specifically to the identified personas and usage patterns and how they translate to Dataiku, equipped over 200 users to execute their own migrations strategically, with office hours, individual coaching sessions, and team-level support ensuring no user was left behind.
Throughout the nine-month engagement, Aimpoint worked as a strategic partner alongside Highmark's internal engineering team, focusing on high-leverage solutions that would best enable the broader user base to succeed.
"What was so attractive from the beginning was not only was Aimpoint a top partner of Dataiku, they were also a top partner of our legacy platform. You really can't go wrong when you have a team of experts providing valuable expertise in either direction. They had the ability to analyze our environment, measure complexity, and calculate how much work we'd have to ask our users to do. That estimate proved out to be pretty accurate as we worked through this journey."
Results
Nearly half of the migration effort was eliminated before a single user touched a workflow for migration. Aimpoint's brief migration assessment surfaced 3,126 workflows across Highmark's legacy environment, then systematically triaged and de-duplicated the inventory, helping the organization retire redundant and outdated assets with confident rather than wasting effort migrating them to the new platform.
200 users are now equipped to build, maintain, and extend their analytics in Dataiku without ongoing consultant support. A seven-week enablement program translated existing skills and usage patterns directly to the new platform, combining hands-on training with office hours and individual coaching to ensure adoption stuck.
Twelve high-risk design patterns were identified, solved, and documented before the broader user base encountered them. Aimpoint partnered with Highmark's internal engineering team to trailblaze solutions for the most challenging migration obstacles—including the corporate land drive dependency flagged as Highmark's biggest adoption risk—and published step-by-step reference materials that accelerated self-service migration across the organization.
Key Takeaways
Highmark Health's migration to Dataiku demonstrates the power of a disciplined, assessment-first approach to analytics modernization. By investing two weeks in a comprehensive current-state analysis, Aimpoint Digital helped Highmark reduce migration scope by nearly half before any user touched a workflow—saving months of effort and giving leadership the confidence to move forward. A tailored enablement program transferred capability to over 200 users, while Lighthouse use case documentation ensured the transition was both efficient and sustainable. Within nine months, Highmark completed the migration and transitioned fully to Dataiku by their contract renewal—achieving a cloud-native analytics environment aligned with their strategic Google Cloud investment with full visibility and governance over the analytics footprint.
Watch our webinar, Highmark Health’s Modernization Journey with Aimpoint Digital, to learn how they successfully migrated a legacy analytics platform to Dataiku.
Get practical insights into change management, user enablement, and scaling analytics with a modern, cloud-native platform.
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