Modern Data Catalog Adoption Driving $390,000 in Annual Efficiency Gains
Zip (ASX:ZIP) is a digital financial services company providing access to seamless solutions that simplify how people pay.
Founded in Australia in 2013 and with a focus on two core markets – Australia and New Zealand (ANZ) and the US, Zip’s mission is to be the first payment choice, everywhere and every day. With over 6 million active customer accounts and tens of thousands of global merchant partners Zip sits atop an ocean of data that requires both careful stewardship, and activation to further drive their growth.
Responsible for making sense of this landscape, and ensuring that governed, trustworthy data is at the fingertips of every employee in Zip’s Australia & New Zealand (ANZ) region, is Leroy Kahn, Data Management Lead.
“I have over 20 years of experience in Data & Analytics across multiple industries, and about half of that time has been spent specializing in data management,” Leroy shared. “I joined Zip to be a part of a successful, innovative, and dynamic scale-up with a purpose-driven work culture. That’s definitely been the experience for me, so far.”
Leroy’s team, ANZ Data & Analytics, reports into the regional Chief Information Officer, overlooking engineering, technology and information security teams. Serving in another business unit are a number of Data Analysts and Data Scientists, specifically focused on credit risk and fraud prevention, and working closely with the Data & Analytics team.
“Our team covers Analytics, Data Science and AI, and Data Engineering, with me looking after data management, and another senior manager looking after data products,” Leroy shared.
Joining Atlan and their fellow customer Uala in the Gamifying Data Governance Masterclass, Leroy shared his team’s gamification strategy, including creative education, competitive leaderboards, and Easter Eggs, and how his team quickly drove user adoption of Atlan – their new data governance platform.
An 18-month Modernization Leads to Atlan
Over the course of 18 months, Zip invested in modernizing their data stack, implementing technologies like Fivetran, dbt, Snowflake, and Tableau. The number of team members capable of data development grew from 5 to 50, speed of delivery increased significantly with 750 releases in just 6 months, and their team and technology grew to support 220 million streaming events per day.
Despite a leap forward in technical capability and capacity, Zip’s team still felt they weren’t getting the most out of their investment.
“What we found from observations and user surveys we conducted, was that our Data & Analytics teams and data users were finding it difficult to quickly, reliably, and easily share, find, understand, and use data to really unlock the value of our data platform and our data products,” Leroy explained.
Joining the ranks of technology companies across the globe, Zip has quickly moved to prioritize profitable growth. To support this objective, Zip’s data team defined a strategy to deliver fast, future-proof data, and set a goal of improving data consumption by 20%.
“Two key parts of this were, one, improving visibility and understanding of data, including business and technical ownership. And two, enabling self-service by data users, which would then allow Data & Analytics teams to focus on value-adding activities, like providing insights,” Leroy shared.
With an eye toward improving their return on investment from their modern data stack and new capabilities, improving visibility and understanding of their data, and delivering simple, self-service experiences to their data consumers, Zip chose Atlan.
“We brought in Atlan to help us activate our metadata,” Leroy shared. “After a successful proof of concept, we put forward a business case to procure Atlan for a six-month proof-of-value. We were aiming to achieve 100 monthly active users and $500,000 (AUD) worth of annualized business value.”
With their six-month proof-of-value approved, the Data & Analytics team began identifying critical dashboards and metrics to document, based on whether or not they contributed to performance measurements and scorecards, or supported critical business activities like consumer and merchant engagement services.
Then, working closely with Zip’s internal communications team, Leroy and his team prepared to launch Atlan during the Australia / New Zealand company all-hands, followed by a gamification exercise to improve contribution to, and consumption of, Atlan.
Launching a Gamification Drive
Underpinning Atlan’s launch was a comprehensive plan, written by Leroy’s team, that included internal branding for their new catalog, two videos that expressed Atlan’s value, and gamification in the form of an “Easter Egg Hunt” encouraging early engagement and weekly competitions to sustain it.
“First, we looked at branding. So we came up with the name for our business glossary called ‘Zipipedia’, which is a combination of Zip and Wikipedia,” Leroy explained. “Then at the launch in our all-hands, we showed two videos. One was a hilarious take on a well-known Australian advertisement about the dire consequences of a small misinterpretation. In the second, we showed just two key features, which was searching from within Slack, then viewing the definitions from within Tableau for things like metrics definitions and report explanations.”
On the day that followed the Atlan launch, Leroy’s team launched an “Easter Egg Hunt”. Five “Zipisms”, an aptly named term for jargon, slang, or colloquialisms that are specific to Zip, were hidden in their new business glossary. Then, data consumers were challenged to locate these terms in the glossary, and send a screenshot to Leroy’s team to collect a prize.
To sustain engagement, Leroy’s team continued their gamification strategy by running four weekly competitions, each with two categories. Using Atlan to measure engagement, the first category was for top active users, rewarding data consumers who used Atlan directly, or indirectly through Slack and Tableau, to search for terms and definitions. The second category gamified contribution, rewarding Zip’s most prolific contributors to asset and term definitions. Each week’s winner would receive an Atlan t-shirt and water bottle.
Throughout the one-month competition period, Leroy’s team would search through Slack on a daily basis for questions about data assets, encouraging users to use Zipipedia with a meme.
Projecting $390,000 in Annual Efficiency Gains
As a result of their hard work preparing the foundation for their glossary enrichment, and a successful gamification drive that drove engagement from contributors and consumers alike, Leroy’s team had the proof they needed to move forward with Atlan on a permanent basis.
“Our first key result in relation to engagement was that we reached 100 monthly active users in just the third week after our launch,” Leroy shared.+
Recognizing that while qualitative feedback and user adoption was compelling, it may not have been enough to make a strong business case, so Leroy and his team went a step further. Before the gamification drive, they had developed a model to estimate the business value yielded from each activity their colleagues would perform on Atlan, and a process to track the volume of these activities as part of their business case.
Through user surveys, and the opportunities to improve that they found across finding, sharing, understanding, and using Zip’s data, Leroy determined an average amount of time saved for each activity or event type for Atlan users. Based on average salary, each minute of time saved was worth $1 (AUD) in efficiency gains, which could then be multiplied by the time saved per event in Atlan.
Estimating how many activities would be performed using Atlan over the 30-day period, Leroy then multiplied these activities by the average time saved and dollar value, and came up with an annualized efficiency target of $500,000 (AUD).
“We then used a customized report provided by our Atlan Customer Success Manager to track actuals over the 30-day period,” Leroy explained. “We landed at an annualized result of $390,000 (AUD). Although we did fall short of our target, this was still a (more than) 3x multiplier.”
Combining proven annualized efficiency gains of $390,000 (AUD) with qualitative data of positive feedback from users, engagement volume, and a looming requirement to reduce data risk and meet regulatory obligations for sensitive data, Zip’s leadership agreed to move forward with Atlan.
Looking Back, Looking Forward
After a visionary gamification drive, and a successful launch of Atlan, Leroy went on to share four key learnings from his experience:
- “Lean on any change management resources you might have, early adopters, or anyone willing to help out.”
- “Don’t expect everything to go according to plan. Roll with the punches, and be resilient.
- “You don’t have to start with data-related use cases. We had a number of teams that had set up and maintained their own business glossaries, which we were more than happy to centralize in Atlan.”
- “Be sure to include both quantitative and qualitative data points to support your business case, and your ongoing adoption and endorsement.”
And throughout the planning, gamification, and launch of Zipiedia, Leroy’s team highlighted three areas where the Atlan’s team support was crucial:
- “They prioritized a feature update, which enabled full visibility of Tableau’s project or folder hierarchy. This helped our users easily map out all the Tableau objects for documentation and use.”
- “They provided customized reporting to track usage and show business value.”
- “Lastly, they gave us some merchandise for our prizes. ”
With an engaged user base, $390,000 AUD of projected business value, and more crucial context added to Zipipedia every day, Leroy and his team have their eyes firmly fixed on further improvements. Enhancing their integration between dbt and Atlan will make it even simpler for Zip’s dbt developers to document metadata using Atlan attributes like owners and linking to glossary terms. Integrating Elementary and Jira to Atlan will enable an end-to-end data observability and quality solution for Zip, significantly improving incident management. But perhaps the most exciting opportunity for Leroy will be the possibilities afforded by AI.
“We’re super keen to get our hands on Atlan AI to support documentation, further improve engagement via Slack and data-self service, and especially natural language querying. There’s some exciting stuff ahead.”
Photo by Jonas Leupe on Unsplash
