Woolworths introduced a "shopping" concept to explain to its business units how they could find and self-serve access to data assets from across the group.
Group head of data management and strategy Robert Stuart told a Gartner conference that the company had introduced the Collibra data management platform in 2019, which can be used to establish lineage, catalogue data and make it searchable, among other functions.
Stuart said the retailer encountered some challenges with uptake.
"Woolworths has a very large, very complex data landscape, and it was probably a little bit overwhelming for a number of our business units," Stuart said.
"The Collibra experience was fantastic. However, it wasn't necessarily giving [units] the customer experience that they were expecting.
"So we took a step back at how can we improve that customers experience and enable self-service data access.
"In addition to that, we also challenged ourselves on how can we generate a compelling, easily understandable business story that we can get and sell our journey to our leadership and to our businesses so that we can get the ongoing investment, sponsorship and support in order for us to be successful in the future."
Out of this, Woolworths came up with the concept of "shopping for data".
Stuart likened the existing data management landscape in the group to a kind of "High Street" retail experience, where would-be data users went from shop to shop - denoting different internal business units and data owners - trying to find a workable data asset for reuse.
"You enter each individual 'shop' searching for your data," he said.
"Each individual shop provides you with a completely different user experience. They're structured differently.
"If you want to get further information or you want to obtain information, some product information is available, sometimes it's not. When you want to access your customer service, sometimes there's shopkeepers available sometimes there's not."
Stuart illustrated this with an example from the group: "We had one program of work which had seven months of work on a single data asset, before they discovered that data asset was never going to achieve their actual goal. You can appreciate the level of inefficiency that went along with that."
Through the use of Collibra, data analytics professionals can search a central index of data assets, work out whether they are at a quality level to fit the use case, and then engage directly with the owners for access.
This was sold conceptually as a kind of shopping experience not dissimilar to what Woolworths offers in its actual retail stores today.
That analogy utilises the kinds of structures that one might encounter in a supermarket shopping experience - aisles, ingredients, product comparison, quality control, shop keepers and checkout - to explain how to interact with Collibra when 'shopping' for usable data.
Aisles, to carry forth the analogy, are used to explain how data is structured in Collibra around different business functions or units.
Just as a consumer might compare different products on a shelf, Collibra lets would-be data users view and compare data assets to assess "suitability to a specific use case", Stuart said.
Shop keepers, in the analogy, are the data stewards that can answer questions about a specific data set; the checkout, meanwhile, is where prospective data 'shoppers' go to finalise their access, which they do by raising a ticket.
The idea, Stuart said, was to show Collibra access as offering a "seamless journey for a data analytics practitioner."
"You go in, you find your data, you drop it into your shopping basket, that raises a ticket straight to the owner, and provides enough information for those data owners to make an informed decision around granting access to that data itself," Stuart said.
"These are the key components of our 'shopping experience' that we went to implement."
Stuart said that his area of Woolworths, which functions as a centre of excellence, had "no mandate to drive data management within the group", meaning it is on the centre to encourage platform use.
Since the introduction of its “shopping for data” idea, “we went from around 150 average users per month to around 700, and developed a user base of around 3500 users," he said.
The centre is now moving beyond data and applying a similar concept to "shopping for reports”.
This is also leading to some substantial rationalisation of report sprawl; in Woolworths finance team alone, the number of active reports has shrunk from 1200 to "around 200".
