Project Overview
Transparity worked with the Royal Horticultural Society (RHS) to integrate its data on an Azure platform that linked Digital Member Sign Up (DMSU) applications to core systems for the charity. Built incrementally, the solution used secure APIs, Service Bus queuing, canonical mappings and Master Data Services.
The live platform now automates membership capture, improves data quality and supports a single customer view, with knowledge transfer enabling the RHS team to extend it themselves.
The Challenge
The Royal Horticultural Society needed a way to integrate data across its multiple systems, with several high-value aspirations in mind:
- Achieve efficiency gains by automating manual tasks
- Create actionable intelligence from high-quality data spanning multiple sources
- Deliver a single view of the customer to boost operational efficiency
- Increase innovation through consistent, programmatic access to data
- Monetise data via public-facing APIs
- Support the procurement of new, function-specific applications that deliver a best-in-class user experience
The initial focus was on integrating the Digital Member Sign Up (DMSU) application: creating an API for the platform to use, and seamlessly connecting it to RHS’s existing core systems. This needed to be delivered in a way that was extensible to other systems, and secure, fault-tolerant and supportable from day one.
The DMSU project itself was the organisational driver for the Integration Platform Stage 1 project. It involved converting RHS’s paper-based membership sign-ups at its gardens into a digital interface, with two integration dependencies: retrieving reference data to populate lookup and picklist fields on the sign-up form, and capturing member sign-up data to be stored in RHS’s systems of record, such as its membership management system.
The Solution
Rather than pursue a single project of massive scope, Transparity and RHS opted for small, incremental deliveries – each targeting a specific, near-term, value-adding outcome, while building components that formed the foundation of the longer-term vision. The architecture was designed around a clear set of non-functional requirements: the process and cost of connecting to on-premises data, handling of asynchronous calls, implementation effort, the ability to architect for growth and flexibility, performance and security, and ongoing supportability.
This Azure application integration platform addressed the requirements of the DMSU API by creating a platform that could integrate across the wider RHS application estate. Azure was chosen for its ability to scale services, with Service Bus queues and subscriber services – plus mapping functions that created a Canonical Service Bus – making it straightforward to bring the rest of the RHS estate onto the platform over time.
Master Data Services (MDS) improved the specification of data down to a single golden source for key entities as part of the wider data engineering consulting work, paving the way for future data quality tooling to ensure the right data cascades downstream to other systems – giving RHS a single, consistent view of customer data.
The Impact
The live platform now automates membership capture, improves data quality and supports a single customer view, with knowledge transfer enabling the RHS team to extend it themselves. The work aligns with our App Innovation, Data Consultancy and Azure Consulting Services.
The choice of standard Azure services struck a careful balance between RHS’s existing C# skills and the serverless technologies used, ensuring the team had a level of familiarity with the techniques involved and could re-use existing code, with scaling, security and error handling built in to support live debugging.
Throughout the build, Transparity’s development team ran regular show-and-tell sessions to walk the RHS team through the implemented code and build familiarity with the platform.The platform is live and successfully integrating tablet-based sign-up with RHS’s core systems in an enterprise-grade, fault-tolerant way, improving the operational processes around member sign-up.
The Benefits
A single, golden source of customer data
Master Data Services gives RHS one consistent, trustworthy view of customer data, ready to support data quality tooling and accurate downstream reporting as the estate grows.
Self-sufficiency through knowledge transfer
Structured knowledge sharing throughout the project means the RHS development team is now successfully managing and extending the system themselves, without ongoing reliance on Transparity.
Solution extensibility
The Service Bus and canonical mapping approach means the platform isn’t limited to DMSU – RHS now has the foundation to bring the rest of its application estate onto the same integration layer over time.
