To help its business units understand how to locate and self-serve access to data assets from throughout the group, Woolworths launched the “shopping” idea.
Robert Stuart, the company’s group head of data management and strategy, said at a Gartner conference that the Collibra data management platform, which can be used to construct lineage, catalogue data, and make it searchable among other things, was released in 2019.
Stuart claimed that there were some issues with uptake for the retailer.
For a few of our business units, Woolworths’ enormous and intricate data landscape may have been a little too much, according to Stuart.
“The time at Collibra was wonderful. However, it wasn’t always providing [units] with the level of customer service they were hoping for.
“So, we stepped back and considered how we could enhance the user experience and offer self-service data access.
In addition, we challenged ourselves to come up with a compelling, clear business narrative that we could use to sell our journey to our leadership and to our companies in order to get the continued funding, sponsorship, and support we need to succeed in the long run.
Woolworths developed the idea of “shopping for data” as a result of this.
“Stuart compared the group’s current data management environment to a sort of “High Street” retail experience, where prospective data users visited various internal business divisions and data owners in search of a useful data asset for reuse.
You look for your data by going into each individual “store,” he explained.
“Your user experience will be absolutely unique in each individual store. They differ in how they are organised.
“Some product information is available, sometimes it isn’t, if you want to get more information or obtain information. When you need to contact customer support, store owners might be available or might not be.”
It is up to the centre to promote platform use, according to Stuart, who said that his division of Woolworths, which serves as a centre of excellence, has “no mandate to drive data management inside the group.”
Since the company’s “shopping for data” concept was introduced, “we increased our average monthly user count from 150 to 700, and our user base grew to almost 3500 users, “added he.
The centre is currently expanding beyond statistics and using a comparable idea to “purchasing reports
The number of active reports has decreased from 1200 to “approximately 200” in the Woolworths finance team alone, as a result of this significant rationalisation of report sprawl.