Driving Data Trust, Quality, and Governance with Atlan
The Active Metadata Pioneers series features Atlan customers who have completed a thorough evaluation of the Active Metadata Management market. Paying forward what you’ve learned to the next data leader is the true spirit of the Atlan community! So they’re here to share their hard-earned perspective on an evolving market, what makes up their modern data stack, innovative use cases for metadata, and more.
In this installment of the series, we meet Kenza Zanzouri, Technical Governance Expert at Contentsquare, a leading digital experience analytics platform that provides rich context and insights into behavior, feelings, and intent at each touchpoint in a customer journey for over 1.3 million websites and applications. Kenza shares the history of Data Governance at Contentsquare, from its inception years ago, to using Atlan to support every BI deliverable, drive business ownership, and improve compliance.
This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.
Could you tell us a bit about yourself, your background, and what drew you to Data & Analytics?
I started working in data about five years ago. Originally, I was studying Political Science, but I transitioned into Data Transformation during my Master’s which was a way for me to apply what I learned from internships in Legal & Compliance. I took a lot of classes on Analytics and Business Intelligence, and decided to accept an internship in Business Intelligence in the luxury fashion industry.
When you’re working on Business Intelligence, you get to touch a bit of everything about data, including metadata and documentation, understanding how data flows and the systems involved, and architecture. That’s when I realized that I didn’t really like building deliverables for Business Intelligence, but I did love all the Data Governance around it. It was a great opportunity for someone young and junior in the industry to learn, understanding people in both technical and business teams.
Then, I was hired at Contentsquare to build the Data Governance team. Back then, Data Governance sat within the BI team, and that was a great way to incubate the function, because we were already a part of the team that understood the business. Our idea was that Data Governance would always be cross-functional, and that we would link together Data Engineers, BI Analysts, and the business units. I learned a lot.
Recently, Data Governance has moved out of the BI team and into the Information Systems Department (ISD), and that’s where I stand today. The job is wider in scope now, where I don’t just look at Data Governance. We’re rebuilding a lot of our systems, so we have to understand architecture, how data flows, who owns data, and data quality.
I’ve spent almost three years at Contentsquare as a Technical Governance Expert. I still look after Data Governance, and I still work very closely with the BI team.
Could you describe Contentsquare?
Today, Contentsquare is a unicorn with the environment of a startup, with our main office in Paris, and our second-largest in New York. We’re a SaaS company, and our main product helps our customers understand their visitors’ behavior on their websites, and learn how they can improve their customer experience.
We’re organized into different branches, of course, like Marketing, Partnerships, R&D, Product Strategy, and People. ISD, where I sit, is under Finance.
Contentsquare has been around for nearly 12 years, and over the past months and years, we acquired two companies, Heap and Hotjar. We’re merging these two entities into Contentsquare, and have rebuilt and restructured a lot of our teams to make sure that we’re selling a better product in the future. Outside of merging in Heap and Hotjar, we’re working on building a single CRM and a single ERP, so there’s a lot of rebuilding that’s happening.
All of this rebuilding is a big reason Data Governance is so involved, with everyone from the BI team to our business units, and all our people, whether they’re operational or high in the hierarchy, are involved. It’s a great time for people to be here, because it’s very rare to witness so much change in a company, and it’s very rare to do it at this pace.
Why search for an Active Metadata Management solution? What was missing?
I think any company, whether it’s in tech or not, understands that data is important. You need to understand how well your business is doing, and you need to operate well, in general. But Contentsquare, like any other company and even when I worked in Retail Fashion, has struggled with a lack of trust in data.
Why? Because, when a company is growing, you start to acquire more and more tools, teams get bigger, then they split. People tend to operate in their silos and start to generate data, then we don’t know what’s being used and what’s not being used. Outside of that, you have Business Intelligence teams that are intervening across departments to make sure that whatever KPIs and deliverables they have are trustworthy and of good quality.
Back then, we didn’t have an Information Systems Department, so you had a lot of systems and a lot of people who weren’t always working together, and no single, centralized space for information. So, two or three years ago when we were considering Atlan, we had some big questions around how the team could deliver dashboards, extractions, or KPIs, when we weren’t really sure about our formulas, where data was coming from, or who owned it.
There were some cases where there wasn’t an expert to ask about a system, and the business had bought a product that didn’t get good adoption, but contained great data. We wanted to use that data, but weren’t sure what we were using or where it came from.
So that’s where Data Governance came in, and that’s when I arrived with my manager to build our team.
But within Data Governance, you need Active Metadata, you need a way to drive ownership, you need to understand your data, and you need a system to centralize all that work. That’s when we had discussions around what tool we wanted to use, and Atlan was one of the best on the market.
We wanted something that could be used by anyone. It was very important to us that we didn’t use something too technical, because the more technical the tool is, the less likely it is that the business will use it, and that’s not the direction we wanted to take. We didn’t want to assume that only Data Engineers and BI Analysts would use it.
We needed something that would be user-friendly, would get great adoption, and had a great Customer Success and Support team. So, we had a lot of demos back then, and chose Atlan as the best one.
Could you describe Contentsquare’s journey with Atlan, so far?
Back then, I think we wanted to implement Atlan too fast, which was good in some ways, but we weren’t ready to get all 1,500 people at Contentsquare to adopt it. We needed to have something valuable in Atlan that people would be interested in so we would avoid pushback from our business units.
So, our best team for adoption was the BI team, where all of their deliverables are now supported by Atlan. I believe that’s the best way to get the business to adopt. It can be hard for the business to adopt a new tool, but it’s much easier when they already have a way of working with technical people, who are already using Atlan.
I think our Data Governance team grew and evolved, and Atlan grew and evolved alongside us. There’s a lot of change. Right now, our priority is rebuilding our architecture and systems and things are in a bit of a pause, but Atlan is still used for a lot of foundational work. If there are new KPIs or updates to our reporting, we use Atlan.
What advice would you share with your peers considering Atlan for Data Governance?
Now that I’ve been in the company for almost three years, I know our systems by heart, our data domains by heart, I know everybody, and I know where we stand. I now understand the business doesn’t always know their data, and I think we could have moved a bit slower at the beginning of our journey to really understand what data and systems were being used. It was all a bit more complicated back then when we didn’t have an Information Systems Department.
There was a lot of documentation and processes missing back then, and we decided to skip some parts of that to jump directly into Data Governance, when we could have spent a bit more time understanding what we had and didn’t have, what we should map, et cetera, before helping the business along in their governance journey. That includes Atlan and also Monte Carlo, where systems and data change and it can be tough to be sure of what data quality rules to use.
I think the advice for myself, if I could go back, would be to take more time understanding the architecture, the plan, and our data stack, and to spend more time with the business. Even if the product is great, there are still people who will have a hard time stopping what they’re doing to rebuild and move forward in a better way.
My second piece of advice, and I think I’m a bit divided on this, but it’s to both “hold the hand” of the business units, and also try to make them more responsible. Because we were a new team, Data Governance was new, and we wanted to do great things, we did too much for the business and they were expecting a lot from me and the team. So, they never felt responsible enough for their data.
To me, data is owned by the business. The systems can be owned by a central team, but data must be owned by the business, because at the end of the day, they’re responsible for who should have access to it, how it should be delivered, what it’s used for, and the way it’s calculated. When you’re doing too much “hand holding”, ownership is hard, and it’s going to be even slower to move forward.
In general, I believe in taking it slow. Data Governance means so much and nothing at the same time. There’s a lot involved, and you’re better off splitting the work and not trying to do it all at the same time. You can’t be working on your data, implementing a Data Catalog, working on Data Quality, and managing compliance all at the same time. It’s not possible.
Lastly, Compliance should be a big priority. I think this is too easily put aside, when it should be one of the big arguments for why everyone should be using a data catalog. I think a lot of companies tend to put that aside, thinking they’re tech-savvy and that data is a domain of expertise, but tomorrow, if you’re audited, it’s going to be very important.
That’s one of the reasons I try to push Data Governance as much as possible, not just through the business, but through anything that’s related to R&D and Product teams. Contentsquare did a lot of work on this, and I’m very happy we’ve been able to make people responsible for Compliance in each department. We had Data Compliance Ambassadors that worked directly with me and the legal team to work on that specific branch of governance.
At the time, tools like Atlan were great to have, because it made things easier to start somewhere, to see our data, and to flag it. It’s one of the things I’ve really liked about Atlan.
Photo by Jason Goodman on Unsplash
