Knowledge Catalog Adoption Driving $390,000 in Annual Effectivity Beneficial properties
Zip (ASX:ZIP) is a digital monetary companies firm offering entry to seamless options that simplify how folks pay.
Based in Australia in 2013 and with a give attention to two core markets – Australia and New Zealand (ANZ) and the US, Zip’s mission is to be the primary cost selection, all over the place and day-after-day. With over 6 million energetic buyer accounts and tens of hundreds of worldwide service provider companions Zip sits atop an ocean of information that requires each cautious stewardship, and activation to additional drive their development.
Answerable for making sense of this panorama, and guaranteeing that ruled, reliable information is on the fingertips of each worker in Zip’s Australia & New Zealand (ANZ) area, is Leroy Kahn, Knowledge Administration Lead.
“I’ve over 20 years of expertise in Knowledge & Analytics throughout a number of industries, and about half of that point has been spent specializing in information administration,” Leroy shared. “I joined Zip to be part of a profitable, progressive, and dynamic scale-up with a purpose-driven work tradition. That’s undoubtedly been the expertise for me, up to now.”
Leroy’s workforce, ANZ Knowledge & Analytics, stories into the regional Chief Data Officer, overlooking engineering, know-how and data safety groups. Serving in one other enterprise unit are plenty of Knowledge Analysts and Knowledge Scientists, particularly centered on credit score danger and fraud prevention, and dealing intently with the Knowledge & Analytics workforce.
“Our workforce covers Analytics, Knowledge Science and AI, and Knowledge Engineering, with me taking care of information administration, and one other senior supervisor taking care of information merchandise,” Leroy shared.
Becoming a member of Atlan and their fellow buyer Uala within the Gamifying Knowledge Governance Masterclass, Leroy shared his workforce’s gamification technique, together with artistic training, aggressive leaderboards, and Easter Eggs, and the way his workforce rapidly drove person adoption of Atlan – their new information governance platform.

Over the course of 18 months, Zip invested in modernizing their information stack, implementing applied sciences like Fivetran, dbt, Snowflake, and Tableau. The variety of workforce members able to information improvement grew from 5 to 50, pace of supply elevated considerably with 750 releases in simply 6 months, and their workforce and know-how grew to assist 220 million streaming occasions per day.
Regardless of a leap ahead in technical functionality and capability, Zip’s workforce nonetheless felt they weren’t getting probably the most out of their funding.
“What we discovered from observations and person surveys we performed, was that our Knowledge & Analytics groups and information customers have been discovering it troublesome to rapidly, reliably, and simply share, discover, perceive, and use information to essentially unlock the worth of our information platform and our information merchandise,” Leroy defined.
Becoming a member of the ranks of know-how firms throughout the globe, Zip has rapidly moved to prioritize worthwhile development. To assist this goal, Zip’s information workforce outlined a technique to ship quick, future-proof information, and set a objective of bettering information consumption by 20%.
“Two key components of this have been, one, bettering visibility and understanding of information, together with enterprise and technical possession. And two, enabling self-service by information customers, which might then permit Knowledge & Analytics groups to give attention to value-adding actions, like offering insights,” Leroy shared.

With an eye fixed towards bettering their return on funding from their fashionable information stack and new capabilities, bettering visibility and understanding of their information, and delivering easy, self-service experiences to their information customers, Zip selected Atlan.
“We introduced in Atlan to assist us activate our metadata,” Leroy shared. “After a profitable proof of idea, we put ahead a enterprise case to acquire Atlan for a six-month proof-of-value. We have been aiming to realize 100 month-to-month energetic customers and $500,000 (AUD) price of annualized enterprise worth.”
With their six-month proof-of-value authorised, the Knowledge & Analytics workforce started figuring out important dashboards and metrics to doc, primarily based on whether or not or not they contributed to efficiency measurements and scorecards, or supported important enterprise actions like shopper and service provider engagement companies.
Then, working intently with Zip’s inside communications workforce, Leroy and his workforce ready to launch Atlan throughout the Australia / New Zealand firm all-hands, adopted by a gamification train to enhance contribution to, and consumption of, Atlan.
Underpinning Atlan’s launch was a complete plan, written by Leroy’s workforce, that included inside branding for his or her new catalog, two movies that expressed Atlan’s worth, and gamification within the type of an “Easter Egg Hunt” encouraging early engagement and weekly competitions to maintain it.

“First, we checked out branding. So we got here up with the title for our enterprise glossary known as ‘Zipipedia’, which is a mixture of Zip and Wikipedia,” Leroy defined. “Then on the launch in our all-hands, we confirmed two movies. One was a hilarious tackle a widely known Australian commercial in regards to the dire penalties of a small misinterpretation. Within the second, we confirmed simply two key options, which was looking out from inside Slack, then viewing the definitions from inside Tableau for issues like metrics definitions and report explanations.”
On the day that adopted the Atlan launch, Leroy’s workforce launched an “Easter Egg Hunt”. 5 “Zipisms”, an aptly named time period for jargon, slang, or colloquialisms which are particular to Zip, have been hidden of their new enterprise glossary. Then, information customers have been challenged to find these phrases within the glossary, and ship a screenshot to Leroy’s workforce to gather a prize.

To maintain engagement, Leroy’s workforce continued their gamification technique by operating 4 weekly competitions, every with two classes. Utilizing Atlan to measure engagement, the primary class was for high energetic customers, rewarding information customers who used Atlan immediately, or not directly by means of Slack and Tableau, to seek for phrases and definitions. The second class gamified contribution, rewarding Zip’s most prolific contributors to asset and time period definitions. Every week’s winner would obtain an Atlan t-shirt and water bottle.
All through the one-month competitors interval, Leroy’s workforce would search by means of Slack every day for questions on information property, encouraging customers to make use of Zipipedia with a meme.
On account of their onerous work getting ready the inspiration for his or her glossary enrichment, and a profitable gamification drive that drove engagement from contributors and customers alike, Leroy’s workforce had the proof they wanted to maneuver ahead with Atlan on a everlasting foundation.
“Our first key lead to relation to engagement was that we reached 100 month-to-month energetic customers in simply the third week after our launch,” Leroy shared.+

Recognizing that whereas qualitative suggestions and person adoption was compelling, it might not have been sufficient to make a powerful enterprise case, so Leroy and his workforce went a step additional. Earlier than the gamification drive, they’d developed a mannequin to estimate the enterprise worth yielded from every exercise their colleagues would carry out on Atlan, and a course of to trace the amount of those actions as a part of their enterprise case.
Via person surveys, and the alternatives to enhance that they discovered throughout discovering, sharing, understanding, and utilizing Zip’s information, Leroy decided a mean period of time saved for every exercise or occasion sort for Atlan customers. Based mostly on common wage, every minute of time saved was price $1 (AUD) in effectivity positive aspects, which might then be multiplied by the point saved per occasion in Atlan.
Estimating what number of actions could be carried out utilizing Atlan over the 30-day interval, Leroy then multiplied these actions by the common time saved and greenback worth, and got here up with an annualized effectivity goal of $500,000 (AUD).
“We then used a personalized report offered by our Atlan Buyer Success Supervisor to trace actuals over the 30-day interval,” Leroy defined. “We landed at an annualized results of $390,000 (AUD). Though we did fall wanting our goal, this was nonetheless a (greater than) 3x multiplier.”
Combining confirmed annualized effectivity positive aspects of $390,000 (AUD) with qualitative information of optimistic suggestions from customers, engagement quantity, and a looming requirement to scale back information danger and meet regulatory obligations for delicate information, Zip’s management agreed to maneuver ahead with Atlan.
After a visionary gamification drive, and a profitable launch of Atlan, Leroy went on to share 4 key learnings from his expertise:
- “Lean on any change administration sources you might need, early adopters, or anybody keen to assist out.”
- “Don’t anticipate every thing to go in keeping with plan. Roll with the punches, and be resilient.
- “You don’t have to begin with data-related use instances. We had plenty of groups that had arrange and maintained their very own enterprise glossaries, which we have been very happy to centralize in Atlan.”
- “Make sure you embody each quantitative and qualitative information factors to assist what you are promoting case, and your ongoing adoption and endorsement.”
And all through the planning, gamification, and launch of Zipiedia, Leroy’s workforce highlighted three areas the place the Atlan’s workforce assist was essential:
- “They prioritized a function replace, which enabled full visibility of Tableau’s venture or folder hierarchy. This helped our customers simply map out all of the Tableau objects for documentation and use.”
- “They offered personalized reporting to trace utilization and present enterprise worth.”
- “Lastly, they gave us some merchandise for our prizes. ”
With an engaged person base, $390,000 AUD of projected enterprise worth, and extra essential context added to Zipipedia day-after-day, Leroy and his workforce have their eyes firmly fastened on additional enhancements. Enhancing their integration between dbt and Atlan will make it even easier for Zip’s dbt builders to doc metadata utilizing Atlan attributes like house owners and linking to glossary phrases. Integrating Elementary and Jira to Atlan will allow an end-to-end information observability and high quality answer for Zip, considerably bettering incident administration. However maybe probably the most thrilling alternative for Leroy would be the potentialities afforded by AI.
“We’re tremendous eager to get our arms on Atlan AI to assist documentation, additional enhance engagement through Slack and data-self service, and particularly pure language querying. There’s some thrilling stuff forward.”
Photograph by Jonas Leupe on Unsplash