Content material Administration Know-how Chief Lowering 6-hour-per-week Information Discovery Effort with Atlan
Valued at $3 billion, Contentful is a Collection F know-how firm that has revolutionized content material administration programs, with a headless structure that makes use of APIs to energy nice digital experiences for his or her 5,000+ clients.
As Contentful continues to develop at unbelievable tempo throughout continents, industries, and use instances, knowledge has performed an important function in enabling good decision-making. And standing behind that knowledge to make sure it’s reliable, accessible, and activated is Robert Clifford-Jones, a 12-year veteran of the Information & Analytics house, and Contentful’s Head of Information Intelligence and Governance.
“Contentful is a scaling firm, and we’re taking market share and wish to proceed to do this. The following half is round how we remodel from what we’re as we speak, which is a single product, right into a multiple-product platform that’s supported by a market,” Robert defined. “Then, what we’re doing now could be ensuring that we’re maturing our processes and might scale even quicker.”
Contentful’s 20-person knowledge group is unfold throughout Information Science, Analytical Engineering, Information Evaluation, and Information Engineering. Being a reasonably new group, their know-how is unburdened by legacy environments, centered round Redshift as their knowledge warehouse, fed by Sew and Phase, and utilizing dbt to construct knowledge fashions which might be pushed to Redash and Looker for end-user entry. And to make sure Contentful’s knowledge shoppers have the correct knowledge to make knowledgeable choices, Robert and his group started looking for an Energetic Metadata Administration answer.
“Once I first began at Contentful, I may see the info group was a extremely precious useful resource for Contentful. We had a really busy Slack channel, and a variety of the questions we have been spending a variety of time on have been ‘What knowledge do we’ve got?’ or ‘Can we use this knowledge for this function?’,” Robert shared. “That led me to suppose that individuals clearly want some contextual info, and they should know what’s accessible.”
Past the necessity for knowledge context and discoverability, Robert’s group sought an answer that might advance their knowledge governance processes akin to entry insurance policies, and enhance belief in knowledge as Contentful was scaling. Launching an RFP course of, Contentful completely evaluated Atlan and Alation, finally selecting Atlan.
“What actually stood out to me is as we have been stepping by way of the method, we had a variety of nice connections that have been constructed with the group. The documentation was second-to-none, and the coaching is supplied with out having to ask for it. Once we have been utilizing Atlan within the proof of worth stage, and we have been evaluating it to the competitors, we simply felt the UI was actually user-friendly and it was going to be straightforward to get adoption from our enterprise customers,” Robert shared.
Robert and his group, three months into their use of Atlan, have elected for a deliberate, step-by-step rollout, making certain that customers are onboarded appropriately, and absolutely perceive easy methods to use Atlan earlier than rolling out new use instances.
Starting by enabling Seek for finish customers, Robert and his group built-in Atlan with Contentful’s most vital functions, making certain their highest precedence knowledge was seen and searchable, was enriched with descriptions, and was documented. Easing finish customers into utilizing Atlan, Robert and his group started by responding to Slack requests about knowledge with hyperlinks to knowledge belongings inside Atlan.
“We used to reply these questions and submit a hyperlink, and now we’ve mentioned ‘Weren’t answering these questions anymore. Go to Atlan, that’s the place your supply of reality is, and that’s the place we wish you to begin self-serving’,” Robert defined.
With their crucial knowledge belongings accessible, enriched, and accessible by way of self-service, Robert and his group’s subsequent step was to allow Atlan Insights, a metadata-based question builder, in response to their earlier querying instrument, Redash, reaching end-of-life.
“Our hand was compelled with Redash coming to the tip of its life, so we needed to in a short time create a journey for onboarding individuals into the instrument to see that contextual info and to construct their queries and do ad-hoc evaluation as they needed to.” Robert shared.
A crucial instrument for Contentful, Redash’s end-of-life meant that with no alternative, queries and ad-hoc evaluation can be difficult-to-impossible for a big swath of information shoppers. And whereas Atlan Insights was a promising answer, migrating meant re-creating queries in Atlan that already existed in Redash. With this downside assertion in thoughts, Robert approached his Atlan Buyer Success Supervisor, who labored with the group to construct an integration that routinely migrated these queries to Atlan in mere weeks, saving extraordinary guide effort.
“We needed to migrate all our queries over from Redash, and we didn’t wish to have to do this manually, however we have been going to should,” Robert defined. “We talked about this to the customer support group and inside a few weeks, we have been informed ‘We’re constructing a connector. If you happen to give us seven days, we’ll have one thing sorted for you so that you don’t should do all that guide effort.’ It’s saved us a lot time.”
Yielding much more time financial savings for Contentful’s knowledge group is automated lineage, considerably easing impression evaluation as knowledge engineers take into account the downstream results of adjustments and enhancements, and accelerating root trigger evaluation when breakages happen.
“It’s simply constructing belief with our stakeholders as a result of issues aren’t failing. By means of Atlan, we’re in a position to talk these adjustments so much higher,” Robert shared.
Lastly, Robert and his group are transferring to boost their catalog to drive a standard language at Contentful, appointing subject material consultants to complement glossaries, then personal and preserve them going ahead.
“Everybody has their very own interpretation of what one thing means so we’re now constructing that frequent language inside Contentful. It is going to be saved in Atlan and we’ll drive individuals to it.”
In simply three months, Contentful’s knowledge group has enhanced their skill to reply questions on their knowledge, migrated to a brand new querying instrument, and is decreasing breakages, permitting them to deal with extra vital work. However for knowledge shoppers, Atlan represents a leap ahead in productiveness, providing self-service for knowledge discovery that when value every of them six hours per week.
Earlier than, we’d be spending a variety of time fielding these questions. We did a person survey, and it was taking perhaps six hours of individuals’s time per week to seek out the correct info, to grasp the data, after which to use that to what it was they have been constructing. With Atlan, we’ve managed to scale back that considerably simply by having the info accessible and having it documented. So we’ve acquired worth for our finish customers, as a result of they’ve the data of their fingers. However for us, it’s permitting us to deal with what’s actually vital to Contentful.”
Robert Clifford-Jones, Head of Information Intelligence and Governance
The strongest illustration of what the info group’s onerous work has yielded for Contentful arrived in acquainted kind. A 3 a.m. telephone name to Robert informing him that crucial fashions driving monetary reporting had failed.
“Our fashions have been working, they run batch processing by way of the night time and every thing failed. It was the tip of the month, so we couldn’t do all our closing experiences and examine all of our monetary reporting on Monday, as was anticipated,” Robert shared. “I acquired a telephone name at three o’clock within the morning going ‘What’s occurring? The place’s this downside? Are you able to repair it?’”
Earlier than adopting Atlan, breakages meant manually going system by system, spending hours pinpointing the place the failure was, and extra hours, nonetheless, resolving the problem. However with automated lineage, Robert and his group have been in a position to resolve the problem inside hours, permitting the essential monetary experiences to run, as anticipated.
The Atlan lineage module allowed us to go in and see the place the failure was in a short time. So it meant we may resolve the problem earlier than reporting kicked off on Monday, whereas earlier than, they might have needed to watch for that repair.”
Robert Clifford-Jones, Head of Information Intelligence and Governance
The following frontier for Robert and the Contentful group focuses on knowledge governance. The group is difficult at work tagging personally identifiable info in Atlan to be able to apply new masking and entry administration insurance policies to additional improve the safety of delicate monetary knowledge. And with upcoming enhancements like Atlan AI, Robert and his group are optimistic that Atlan may help them deal with what issues.
“The way in which I’m interested by that is how do I unencumber my group to do the issues which might be vital to them and the issues they’re keen about. Quite a lot of the time is spent doing the issues which might be barely mundane that might be achieved higher by AI,” Robert defined. “That’s one thing we positively wish to do with Atlan going ahead. Given the brand new product releases arising, we may use Atlan extra in that house to do the documentation that takes up a variety of our time, and free our individuals as much as do the thrilling stuff.”
Having pushed Contentful’s knowledge group to new ranges of productiveness, and unlocking a brand new degree of understanding and entry for knowledge shoppers, Robert stays assured that Atlan shall be with he and his group each step of the best way as they proceed to develop.
I’ve adopted many a know-how and I’ve had good help up to now. I’ve by no means had nearly as good help from a corporation as I’ve had from Atlan. I ask a query, and it’s answered virtually instantly. I don’t anticipate that, however that’s what occurs. If we elevate a ticket or we spot one thing that’s mistaken, the group are on it just about throughout the hour. The help has been second-to-none.”
Robert Clifford-Jones, Head of Information Intelligence and Governance
Picture by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash
