Matthew Denison
Data and Analytics Solution Architect — Microsoft Fabric, Azure & Power BI
07970 915 345 · matthew@disseminate.co.uk · linkedin.com/in/matthewdenison · Wakefield
Disseminate Limited — independent contractor, outside IR35
Profile
Data and Analytics Solution Architect with over 25 years' experience in data, analytics and business intelligence, including 15 years as an independent contractor. Specialises in Microsoft Fabric and Azure data platforms, having designed and delivered six medallion architectures across Azure Synapse and Microsoft Fabric, including Synapse to Fabric migrations. Offers end-to-end expertise spanning data engineering, modelling and reporting, with an increasing focus on AI-driven solutions and AI-assisted development to accelerate delivery and improve quality.
Combines a CIMA Passed Finalist management accounting background with extensive financial reporting expertise using Dynamics 365 data. Comfortable working directly with Finance Directors, translating complex financial requirements into robust technical solutions.
Brings strong stakeholder engagement, presentation and client-facing skills, alongside a proven track record of dependable delivery.
Core Skills
Microsoft FabricLakehouses, Warehouse, Data Pipelines, Spark notebooks, OneLake shortcuts, Direct Lake, deployment pipelines, Git integration
Power BISemantic models, Power BI Project files (PBIP) for source control and AI-assisted development, Power Query, calculation groups, paginated reports, row level security
AzureAzure Synapse (serverless SQL, dedicated SQL pool, Spark pools and notebooks, pipelines), Azure Data Lake Storage, Azure SQL Database, Azure Data Factory, Azure Automation
Dynamics 365 F&OSynapse Link and Fabric Link, table schema and relationships, financial dimensions, data entities, AOT
LanguagesSQL and T-SQL, PySpark, Python, DAX, M
Architecture & modellingMedallion architecture, data warehousing, Kimball dimensional modelling, Type 2 and conformed dimensions, master data management
DeliveryAzure DevOps, CI/CD, AI-assisted development (Claude Code, GitHub Copilot), agile
ConsultancyClient liaison, stakeholder management, requirements workshops, presentation, presales
Finance & accountingManagement accounting, financial reporting, consolidated reporting, multi-currency
Certifications & Qualifications
- Microsoft Certified: Fabric Data Engineer Associate (2025)
- Microsoft Certified: Fabric Analytics Engineer Associate (2024)
- Chartered Institute of Management Accountants — Passed Finalist
- Prince 2 Practitioner
- ISEB Foundation Certificate in Business Analysis
- BA (Hons) Accounting and Finance — University of Salford
Backed by a dozen Microsoft data and analytics certifications going back to 2008, spanning the classic Microsoft BI stack (SSAS, SSRS, SSIS, Power Pivot, Power View, Performance Point) through to Power BI and Fabric.
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Career History
Data and Analytics Consultant, West Yorkshire Combined Authority
Freelance · Sep 2026 – Oct 2026
Data Platform Lead, Pilot Learner Destinations System
- Architected the Microsoft Fabric platform that won the competitive bid, then built it. A medallion architecture ingesting survey and Individualised Learner Record data, with per-provider row level security in the reporting semantic model.
- Cost-engineered the platform to £10 to £12 a month against £200 plus for an always-on capacity, using a pay-as-you-go F2 capacity paused and resumed by Azure Automation around the nightly load.
- Built the platform with AI-assisted delivery through Claude Code.
Data and AI Consultant, NG Bailey
Freelance · Sep 2026 – Oct 2026
- Delivered Cost Value Reconciliation reporting. Agreed the commitment definition with Finance and built SQL views and stored procedures as a single source of truth.
- Automated the rollout to 17 divisions with a PowerShell pipeline built through AI-assisted development.
- Ran enablement sessions for the Data and Analytics team on AI-assisted delivery, demonstrating agentic ways of working and Fabric development through source-controlled repos.
Data and Analytics Solution Architect, Kerv (formerly Inciper)
Contract · 7 renewals · Dec 2021 – Oct 2026
Solution Architect in the Data and Analytics team of a Microsoft D365 consultancy, placed with its clients.
- Designed and built medallion data platforms across Azure Synapse and Microsoft Fabric for clients including Savills, Turner & Townsend, Gamma Communications, A2Dominion, Wakefield District Housing and AX Accident Exchange.
Savills Europe
- Ran requirements workshops with the Finance Directors of seven European countries, all on one Dynamics 365 Finance and Operations platform, each needing a local management accounts pack in its own structure while Central Finance needed a single consolidated view.
- Wireframed the pack, gained sign-off, and designed a Kimball dimensional model from a bus matrix, with conformed dimensions and fact tables spanning Profit and Loss and related reporting, Receivables and Payables.
- Conformed the chart of accounts so each country kept its familiar local structure while shared attributes carried the central consolidation.
- Ingested the D365 finance data through Export to Data Lake.
- Built Synapse serverless SQL views over the resulting CSV files on the fly from their Common Data Model definitions, materialised staging in a dedicated SQL pool and loaded the dimensional warehouse using stored procedures.
- Orchestrated the loads with a metadata-driven Azure Data Factory framework of configuration-driven parent and child pipelines.
- Served it through a centralised Power BI semantic model, with multi-currency reporting via Tabular Editor calculation groups and dynamic row level security, giving every country self-service reporting from one governed model.
Savills UK
- Won the Savills UK work on the strength of the European delivery, to produce the strategy and solution architecture for moving the finance reporting platform from Dynamics AX 2012 to D365.
- Captured the data requirements of every downstream consumer, the SSRS report suite serving 6,500 users, TM1, Hyperion, the legacy CRL data warehouse and Power BI.
- Authored the strategy and solution architecture and gained stakeholder sign-off, the blueprint the build then followed.
- Led a team of four to deliver the build.
- Used the Dynamics AX application object tree (AOT) to decode the underlying table schema and relationships, rebuilding the data entities.
- Built a new dimensional model as a fully virtual data warehouse in Synapse serverless SQL, with no dedicated pool, chosen because the UK reporting needed data fresh within 30 minutes and live views over the lake stay current without a batch load.
- Built interfaces feeding each existing system in its expected shape, so the legacy consumers kept running on D365 after the migration.
- Rebuilt the SSRS suite as DAX queries over a single Power BI semantic model, giving one governed version of the truth.
Savills Data Lake Export to Azure Synapse Link migration
- Migrated Savills' D365 ingestion from the deprecated Export to Data Lake to Azure Synapse Link, re-pointing only the landing views that served as the interface so everything downstream was uninterrupted.
Savills Azure Data Platform to Fabric migration
- Migrated the European data platform from Azure Synapse to Microsoft Fabric, designing the Fabric architecture around the existing estate to minimise downstream impact and reuse as many SQL artefacts as possible.
- Built a medallion architecture in Fabric, Bronze reading the Synapse Link data in place through OneLake shortcuts with no duplication, Silver recreating the original Synapse layers as SQL endpoint views.
- Carried the dedicated pool forward into a Gold Fabric Warehouse, migrating the stored procedures that build the dimensions and facts into a materialised dimensional model.
- Kept views over the Gold Warehouse as the stable interface to everything downstream, so the TMDL semantic model and reports were unchanged.
Savills BAU
- Built the Savills master data platform on Fabric, producing a conformed master record for each entity that carries its key in every source system and its mastered attributes.
- Designed it as the foundation of a wider strategy to enrich the other medallions with mastered keys and attributes, and in time to build a single global warehouse combining UK, Europe and CRM.
- Re-engineered the legacy SSIS-based CRL data warehouse onto Fabric rather than lifting it, sourcing Bronze from OneLake shortcuts to the existing Fabric medallions, cleaning in Silver with Spark notebooks and loading a Gold Fabric Warehouse.
- Built the Reapit platform over fourteen years of CRM history in Snowflake, driven by an orchestration database holding each table's schema, column list and watermark for incremental loads.
Turner & Townsend
- Led the greenfield build of a new Microsoft Fabric reporting platform over D365 for Turner & Townsend, a global professional services firm of 22,000 people.
- Designed a workspace-per-layer medallion architecture, with Bronze, Silver and Gold Lakehouses each in its own workspace and individual marts above Gold.
- Fed Bronze from the Synapse Link data through a OneLake shortcut, a single Spark notebook materialising tables as Delta twelve in parallel.
- Drove the Silver layer from one configuration file defining every table, built by a single notebook that runs quality checks in load and writes a data dictionary.
- Built the Gold dimensional model from configuration over a shared function library, so every dimension and fact builds identically with consistent metadata.
- Wrote Claude skills, Create Silver Config, Create Dimension and Create Fact, that generated the configuration and notebooks to the defined pattern, keeping the build fast and consistent.
- Served users through individual mart workspaces, each with its own Direct Lake semantic model and row level security, so reporting needs no refresh.
- Built nearly the whole platform in VS Code with Claude, working through a Git-integrated workflow of a feature branch per backlog item, an agreed plan, and pull-request review in Azure DevOps before merge.
Gamma Communications
- Architected the data and analytics solution for Gamma Communications, a FTSE 250 unified communications provider, as the lead data and analytics consultant.
- Its billing systems generate millions of lines a month, and finance needed Monthly Costs and Revenue reporting at the lowest grain, too voluminous to load whole into D365.
- Landed the billing data in a Synapse dedicated SQL pool through the metadata-driven Azure Data Factory framework, then sent it two ways.
- Built an integration table of two-sided journals aggregated to the D365 financial dimensions, ready for integration into D365 so the ledger balanced without the volume.
- Loaded the same data into a dimensional warehouse at the most granular billing-line level.
- Closed the loop through Synapse Link, the posted journals flowing back out of D365 and excluded from the reload so nothing counted twice.
- Produced a warehouse that generates a fully balancing Balance Sheet and Profit and Loss at billing-line granularity.
A2Dominion
- A2Dominion, a large UK housing association with over 38,000 homes, was migrating to D365 and needed its report estate brought across, but a previous attempt had failed and stakeholders were wary.
- Came in as Solution Architect and rebuilt stakeholder confidence, drawing requirements out of a guarded business, as much of the job as the design itself.
- Designed the enterprise dimensional model, covering Procurement, Fixed Assets and Finance with an extensive custom area for the group's leases, treasury and lender covenant reporting.
- Mapped every report column through the model back to the D365 source, the specification that drove the technical build.
- Delivered the platform as a medallion architecture on Azure Data Lake, with Synapse Link feeding the D365 data and Synapse notebooks for transformation.
- Migrated the existing report estate onto the new platform.
Wakefield District Housing
- Won the engagement at presales, leading demonstration sessions with the practice lead that showed the platform delivered for Savills Europe.
- Reused the Savills Europe patterns wholesale, remapping the design to Wakefield's UK legal entities, each with its own set of financial dimensions.
- Extended the reporting pack with a Balance Sheet, over a General Ledger of more than 25 million records.
AX Accident Exchange
- Delivered the reporting platform end to end as the sole data and analytics consultant on the project, reusing the Savills Europe patterns.
- Extended the scope with a suite of HR reports over the Human Resources module in D365.
Power BI and Business Intelligence Consultant, CappKind (formerly BIM-UK)
Contract · 2 renewals · Sep 2020 – Dec 2021
Yorkshire Water
- Built the data platform and warehouse tracking Yorkshire Water's capital projects through their stage gates, modelling the gates as Type 2 slowly changing dimensions.
- Automated the existing Excel finance packs, driven by pivot reports and CUBE formulas over a live semantic model, then delivered a replacement suite in Power BI.
Data and Analytics Consultant, East London Health and Care Partnership
Contract · Jun 2020 – Sep 2020
- Built an SSIS ETL process extracting 2 billion primary care observations into a Kimball warehouse and SSAS Tabular model of patient outcome registers, identifying patients vulnerable to Covid-19.
Power BI Lead Consultant, Inciper (now Kerv)
Contract · Feb 2020 – Apr 2020
ThirdWay
- Delivered an Azure SQL Data Warehouse, Azure Analysis Services model and Power BI platform for CRM and sales pipeline reporting. Cut short by the onset of Covid.
Data and Analytics Consultant, Yorkshire Water
Contract · 1 renewal · Oct 2019 – Feb 2020
- Designed and built a prototype predictive analytics platform for Yorkshire Water's waste water network, streaming data through Azure Event Hub and Stream Analytics into Azure SQL and Power BI.
- Built a .NET service ingesting rainfall forecasts from the Hydromaster weather API, driving sewage pumping station risk, pump availability and alarm reporting.
Data and Analytics Consultant, Metro Rod
Contract · 1 renewal · Apr 2019 – Sep 2019
- Developed the BI strategy and built the Azure analytics platform behind it, an Azure SQL Data Warehouse and Azure Analysis Services tabular model surfaced through Power BI over a live connection.
- Delivered targeted reporting to the national franchisee network through row level security, including geospatial job distribution analysis on a Power BI Mapbox visual.
Business Intelligence Developer, Computershare
Contract · 2 renewals · Aug 2018 – Apr 2019
- Rebuilt the client reporting as SSRS paginated reports for Computershare Loan Services, a mortgage operations partner.
Data and Analytics Consultant, Inciper (now Kerv)
Contract · 2 renewals · Jan 2018 – Jul 2018
Marston Holdings
- Built an early Azure enterprise data warehouse over a Dynamics 365 source, its ETL handcrafted in Azure Data Factory v1 JSON and loaded via Polybase into Azure SQL Data Warehouse and Analysis Services.
- Presented a case study to the Microsoft Data Platform team.
Business Intelligence Consultant, Enserve Group (formerly Spice)
Contract · 20 renewals · Jul 2011 – Dec 2017
- Lead analyst and solution architect for the group's enterprise data warehouse and SharePoint BI platform, over six and a half continuously renewed years.
- Loaded it from nine separate divisional ERP finance systems via SSIS, introducing group-wide master data management to consolidate their charts of accounts into a single conformed enterprise structure.
- Delivered automated divisional and consolidated management accounts packs covering Profit and Loss, Balance Sheet and Cash Flow, working with every divisional and the Group Finance Director to support the whole group's month-end.
- Built the packs in Excel over the SSAS cubes using Cube functions, allowing adjustments directly on the sheet.
- Ran a process reengineering project that added £50,000 a month of profit on a single contract.
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Permanent Roles
SharePoint Consultant, Capita IT Services
Permanent · Apr 2011 – Jul 2011
- SharePoint 2010 requirements and topology design. The last permanent role before beginning a contracting career.
Spice PLC (later Enserve Group)
Permanent · Aug 1999 – Apr 2011
Twelve-year permanent tenure, progressing from web development to Business Intelligence Manager
- Built Spice's early web and intranet business systems, including a web-based purchase order and stock management application.
- Integrated a divisional work management system with the finance system, and extended it for distributed access across the franchisee base.
- Led SharePoint delivery across the autonomous divisions, designing the enterprise content processes and taxonomy.
- Built the group's first enterprise data warehouse as Business Intelligence Manager, on a bus architecture with audited ETL, master data management conforming key dimensions and OLAP cubes, the foundation that became the ongoing Enserve contract.
Assistant Finance Manager, Hitchen Foods
Permanent · Aug 1997 – Aug 1999
- Produced the month-end and year-end management accounts, the finance foundation behind the later reporting work.