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Have you thought about what data management looks like in your organization? Whether you feel that your data management is under control, or you’re just getting started, we (your Alteryx team of Product experts) thought it’d be a great idea to share some best practices. This is a great piece to get started if you are responsible for rolling out Connect. Read on for inspiration, help or just the encouragement you need to push your data management project forward and feel confident that anyone in your organization can find the data they need.
Introducing Alteryx Connect
Understanding your data is crucial to successfully execute on any business strategy. The Data Catalog in Connect delivers a product that allows you to gain a 360-degree view of all data that exists within your organization. We’ve identified 3 crucial areas to achieve success with data management while introducing this product to your company: your team, content, and internal communications.
Your Team
Choose Your Data Champions.
Rally participation from relevant stakeholders if you want to put interesting and sufficiently-rich content into the knowledge system. Your core group is needed both during the project as well as after its completion during the system's operation. Attracting the right people requires skills in both searching for champions and gaining the necessary buy-in from leadership.
- Support from Your Sponsor: The active participation of a sponsor is crucial. The sponsor must be active not only during the project but during the operation as well. It is the sponsor who should explain to the managers of the business departments the benefits of the culture change that will take place once proper data management is in full effect. It is also the sponsor who drives the internal communication related to the new knowledge system.
- Choose Your Champions: if there is sufficient support, it's important to gather a group of people willing to introduce and adopt the new system and do it with initiative, creativity and energy, putting in more work than required. Once this group is on your side and sees the benefits of the product—they serve as a great example and advocate for other teams.
For the implementation to go smoothly it’s important to identify the company processes which are related to this business knowledge. Change plans and adequate time allocation for the roll out is key. We have seen great results with "hands-on" training sessions that include scheduled time for a session dedicated to working on the system's real business content, like loading in their frequently used data sources. Usually the trainees start creating real system content during the workshop sessions and completing it later when training has finished. It is important that these people have the time to complete their initial content immediately after training finishes so that they don’t forget what they have learned.
What Happens When the Necessary People Aren't Recruited
If the project runs without any cooperation with the business departments it's providing new services for, only technical people from BI/IT will participate. As a result, the system will not address the concerns and needs of business users, will not be written in their language and ultimately excludes them. If the cultural support isn't there, the required change to the company's work processes won't be part of the project's criteria or even within its scope. This will result in a lack of buy-in for the time allocations and learning required for getting a new system up and running.
Content
Who are You Building For?
Your Data Catalog will most likely be leveraged by two main types of users: business users and technical users. A business user might have a term they are interested in learning and look for it in a report. A more technical user might be setting up a workflow and need to discover what data sources they can use. When building up content, you should try to keep both user groups and their needs in mind.
Think Big, Start Small
All modern companies have vast warehouses of data. Finding a place to start can seem like a daunting task. That’s why your first task should be to load your Alteryx workflows into Connect and produce a simple overview of them, so you can get a base understanding of what workflows are available in your organization.
Having Enough Useful Content for Your Users
Once you’ve created your overview, you’ll need to start overseeing the content and how it’s being interacted with. How much content the system is launched with has clear implications for its subsequent adoption and success: your data management system must be launched with sufficient content to answer an adequate number of people’s questions within the organization.
Insufficient Content Leading to the Project's Failure
A system is not "adopted" by the users when:
- The project's acceptance criteria is focused only on the technological functioning of the system.
- The newly-launched system provides only a few sample data structures and business users cannot get answers to any useful business questions from them.
- When a group of individuals allocated to create and plan a roadmap to further improve or maintain the data catalogue does not exist.
- When the users continue to look to other sources to answer their hardest business problems.
How to Start Cataloguing Your Data
Given that you need to provide content for your data catalog, where do you begin and how do you start gathering it?
We recommend selecting 2-5 workflows to focus on. Ideally, they’re going to be workflows that are used by a significant number of staff or personnel. These are going to be the workflows you will provide initial content about.
How does this documentation work?
You might need to train your team to follow an agreed upon set of documenting steps. Here’s a set of steps we’d recommend:
1. Document Data Sources
Each workflow has data sources. Load your chosen workflows’ data sources into your data catalog. For the data sources included in the data catalog, the user should be able to view the following information:
- Where to find the data in the environment
- Who is responsible for the data source, access, and data access management
- Basic information about the data source and what the data source is good for
- Your team needs to provide this information. Data sources have owners and those owners need to be involved in this documentation process with your team. The owners should set aside time to contribute to the success of this initiative. It’s essential for those individuals to communicate the importance of this effort to their manager. Owners could include IT, business analysts, a center of excellence or even a data science team.
Once you’ve provided the above information, you can enrich your data sources further with custom attributes. You can set owners, enter a description, and extend these values using custom fields.
2. Define Reports
Many workflows are designed to produce reports. Once you’ve documented the data sources, you can continue by documenting the reports that your selected workflows produce. The process is similar to the data catalog and will need to be done together with the reports’ owners. Load the workflows’ reports into Reports and provide the following information:
- Which terms from he Business Glossary are in the report
- Who is responsible for it, the report owner
- Basic description of report use
3. Build a Business Glossary
The final step is to document the business terms used in your reports. Link the key terms from your reports to your Business Glossary and provide clear definitions of each term. You will probably need to agree on the definitions with the report’s owner and other stakeholders on the term.
Other useful information for users could be added (especially for business users, after all, supporting business is what gets you the budget). This might be:
- Useful how-to’s (how to access the reports or DWH etc.)
- A dictionary of terms and abbreviations used
- The contacts of people from BI and their profiles
- News about current projects and other items
Once you’ve documented these initial 2-5 workflows, your team can select another group of 5 and document those. And so on.
Communication
The Importance of Internal Communication
Once you’ve got your initial data entries loaded into the catalogue and feel you have enough content to launch with, you can introduce Connect to your organization.
At the beginning of the project, you have to determine who the groups of business or technical users are who will benefit from the system most. It's important to cooperate with representatives from these user groups during the initial adoption period and communicate with them regularly during the system's later operation.
The system must become familiar to everyone in the company and must be regularly marketed within the business. The business launch could be accompanied by a blog published on the company intranet. Similar blogs or communications promoting interesting new content might be published several times a year while the system is in operation to introduce new data sources, for example. The sponsor should meet with representatives of key business/technical users (ideally, once every quarter) and gather their feedback (what is good, what is missing etc.). Communication is everything.
Internal Marketing – What we Recommend Avoiding
When there is no "big-time event" business launch, only the formal acceptance of the project, people in the company won't know about the project or even that a knowledge system has been set up and is ready to serve out information.
If the sponsor loses touch with the system after project launch, they'll have no idea how to develop it further. If they don't speak about it with managers, they won't know how to use the system to support their business targets. And finally, with no links between the system and the company intranet or blogs, the knowledge system will soon fade from the company consciousness until it's forgotten by everyone but the roll out group and the accounts department who tries to rationalize its cost.
Post Launch…
The launch has gone well. There were some bumps during the first couple of months of adoption, but these have been solved. Management is happy, the project was successful, the money invested into Connect is considered well-spent. The list of documented workflows is growing and the pages of the Business Glossary, Data Catalog and Reports are filling. The question is, what next? Where exactly should the company direct any new data management budget?
The key recommendation here is to analyze thoroughly what should be improved and who could benefit from further investment.
The Next Step
We hope we've helped you see a way to begin your journey. We’ve found planning small actions that have clear and tangible results a fruitful strategy. But what about you? Do you do it differently? Share your experience in the comments—we’d love to learn more about your approach to data management. Check out the Connect product page for more information!
