Gail Okes

I'm a seasoned Data Analytics professional with a passion for data visualisation and storytelling. My main strength is frontend, building Power BI reports and dashboards with optimised visual design and semantic models that deliver concise actionable insights. I have a solid background in SQL, data integration, data marts and warehouses, and have worked with various platforms including Azure. In addition, I have several years' experience as an Analyst focused on data quality and governance.

Senior Data Engineer at Bet Software (2023-08 – Present)

• Stakeholder engagement and relationship management
• Data analysis
• Data integration, wrangling and dataset creation
• Dashboard development and maintenance in PowerBI
• Developed central Power BI datasets and dashboard templates for smarter development
• Development & management of Power BI online workspaces and Reportserver reporting environment, including managing datasets, gateways etc
• Operational reports in SSRS
• Maintenance of datamarts, data warehouse and tabular models in SSAS
• Daily troubleshooting on ETL jobs and reports
• Mentoring and coordinating juniors
• Use of Git repositories - deployment via Azure Devops pipelines – coordinating team deployments and troubleshooting issues

Senior BI Analyst(Consultant) at IT Business (Kid Group) (2022-03 – 2023-07)

Clients: Investec Risk Division (Sandton Head Office) and Dark Fibre Africa

• Stakeholder engagement and relationship management
• Maintenance of existing systems, data warehouse, SSAS tabular models and reports
• Creating reports
• Troubleshooting ETL and data model issues

Senior BI Analyst(Consultant) at DVT (2018-07 – 2022-03)

Worked on multiple projects involving the following. Clients: Amrod, Aon, RMB, Vodacom, Imperial Logistics

• Solution design, including POCs
• Data analysis and modelling (SSAS, Power BI semantic models)
• Data warehouse design and implementation
• Data migration (SSIS, Azure Data Factory)
• Reporting (Power BI, SSRS, Qliksense)

Technical Consultant at Altron Karabina (2017-11 – 2018-07)

• Scoping requirements for new Microsoft Dynamics CRM system
• Created technical specs for reports, which involved mainly identifying business requirements and mapping source data to report outputs
• Amending existing SSRS reports in line with business requirements
• Developed master data model for standardised master data, using MDS and DQS

Data Analyst / Data Governance Consultant at IDI Technology Solutions (2015-03 – 2017-10)

IDI is a software development company in the Governance, Risk and Compliance space, which also offered an Insurance Data Warehouse (IDW) product. Part of team implementing the data warehouse product across clients, who are insurance companies, brokers and underwriters.

• Implementation of master data, work with clients and Insurance system providers to ensure data compliance with metadata and business rule requirements
• Data quality management via mapping and exception reporting
• Set up reports on financial and insurance metrics, as well as exception reports on data validation and quality (SSRS, Tableau)
• Training end-users on master data management in MDS

Data Analyst at Regenesys Business School (2012-05 – 2014-09)

Regenesys is a private business school based in Sandton. I was part of the IT Department (student administration), reporting to the Head of Operations and IT. Involved in a data migration project for CRM, in terms of collating and transforming legacy data into appropriate formats for the new system, Openbravo.

Also responsible for creating a student results database, which involved collation and transformation of large amounts of legacy data from excel and MySQL databases into MS SQL. In consultation with end-users, I set up a standard master data schema and identified key metrics for reporting e.g. student throughput, graduation eligibility percentage etc. I set up operational reports and management dashboards on the above metrics in SSRS and Qlikview.

This enabled better performance measurement and management decision making. The main challenge was getting business to move away from manual processes, capture the data and utilise the reports. A lot of student records were incomplete, so reports were not giving the desired outputs.

With support from top management, we were able to achieve better compliance over time.

Data Analyst at Auto Trader (2010-03 – 2012-04)

Created a SQL database and dashboard reports on magazine circulation for Auto Trader and Commercial Trader. This entailed data collation and standardisation across segments like retail outlet, Types, franchises and geographic areas. The reports enabled greater visibility across the circulation network and resulted in reduced waste (returned copies).

In addition, I set up reports on operations e.g. tracking advert volume over time segmented by location, dealership groups, makes and models and other customer segments. I also set up reports tracking website usage and social media activity around the brands including post-campaign analyses. I was involved in initial scoping for CRM implementation in terms of master data creation.

BA Hons in Socio-Informatics – Stellenbosch University (2004)