Microsoft Fabric Lakehouse platform architecture

Case study with the Department of Fire & Emergency Services (DFES)

Introducing the Department of Fire & Emergency Services (DEFS)

The Department of Fire and Emergency Services (DFES)'s purpose is to support the WA community to prepare for disasters and protect them against the unpredictability of natural hazards and emergency incidents. Operating 24 hours per day, seven days per week, on land, in the air and by sea, DFES’ operational fleet is fit for purpose, reliable, specialised, and vital to prevent, prepare, respond to and recover from emergencies across hazards in Western Australia.

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Relationships Australia WA Blog Feature Card

Data Strategy and Platform Implementation

Challenges: Relationships Australia WA prioritises the allocation of available resources towards maximising its contribution to the Western Australian community and, as the organisation has grown, identified a need to further streamline workflows and address reporting challenges due to legacy platforms and siloed program data. To embark upon a review of their data management landscape and associated architecture, the team brought DataDivers on board.

The Department of Fire & Emergency Services (DFES) aimed to modernise its Operational Management System (OMS) by decoupling reporting from core transactional processes. Previously, reporting was tightly coupled with the operational relational database, resulting in inefficiencies, duplicated effort, and limited scalability.

The Operational Information Systems (OIS) team identified an opportunity to shift analytics to a dedicated Microsoft Fabric lakehouse, decoupling day-to-day operational processing from reporting and analytics workloads. This would streamline data access, improve performance, and reduce ad-hoc reporting by enabling enriched insights through reusable Power BI dashboards, ultimately freeing up the team to focus on higher-value work.

DataDivers co-architected an Open Water Fabric lakehouse platform with DFES, using medallion architecture and star schema modelling to align with OIS requirements. Open Water Fabric is a metadata-driven solution, one of the first of its kind, which automated ingestion and transformation logic, enabling repeatable reporting.

As an early adopter of Microsoft Fabric, we took the lead in designing and implementing the metadata-driven architecture, while Microsoft supported the initiative with technical guidance and stayed closely engaged throughout the project’s delivery. The solution integrated with Power BI and existing intranet workflows, enabling decentralised, team-owned reporting with ease of access.

Reduced dependency on ad-hoc reporting by enabling repeatable, metadata-driven processes
Empowered teams to self-serve insights via secure Power BI apps embedded in the intranet
Improved cross-departmental trust in data as Fabric became a recognised source of truth
Accelerated reporting and modelling speed, freeing OIS staff to focus on higher-value work
Up-skilled internal team members, with staff actively pursuing Fabric certifications

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