Content material Administration Know-how Chief Decreasing 6-hour-per-week Knowledge Discovery Effort with Atlan
Valued at $3 billion, Contentful is a Collection F know-how firm that has revolutionized content material administration methods, with a headless structure that makes use of APIs to energy nice digital experiences for his or her 5,000+ prospects.
As Contentful continues to develop at unimaginable tempo throughout continents, industries, and use instances, information has performed an important position in enabling sensible decision-making. And standing behind that information to make sure it’s reliable, out there, and activated is Robert Clifford-Jones, a 12-year veteran of the Knowledge & Analytics area, and Contentful’s Head of Knowledge Intelligence and Governance.
“Contentful is a scaling firm, and we’re taking market share and wish to proceed to try this. The following half is round how we remodel from what we’re at present, 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’s ensuring that we’re maturing our processes and might scale even quicker.”
Contentful’s 20-person information crew is unfold throughout Knowledge Science, Analytical Engineering, Knowledge Evaluation, and Knowledge Engineering. Being a reasonably new group, their know-how is unburdened by legacy environments, centered round Redshift as their information warehouse, fed by Sew and Section, and utilizing dbt to construct information fashions which are pushed to Redash and Looker for end-user entry. And to make sure Contentful’s information shoppers have the proper information to make knowledgeable choices, Robert and his crew started looking for an Energetic Metadata Administration answer.
“After I first began at Contentful, I might see the info crew was a very priceless useful resource for Contentful. We had a really busy Slack channel, and plenty of the questions we had been spending plenty of time on had been ‘What information do we now have?’ or ‘Can we use this information for this goal?’,” Robert shared. “That led me to assume that folks clearly want some contextual info, and they should know what’s out there.”
Past the necessity for information context and discoverability, Robert’s crew sought an answer that would advance their information governance processes reminiscent of entry insurance policies, and enhance belief in information as Contentful was scaling. Launching an RFP course of, Contentful totally evaluated Atlan and Alation, ultimately selecting Atlan.
“What actually stood out to me is as we had been stepping by means of the method, we had plenty of nice connections that had been constructed with the crew. The documentation was second-to-none, and the coaching is offered with out having to ask for it. After we had been utilizing Atlan within the proof of worth stage, and we had 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 crew, three months into their use of Atlan, have elected for a deliberate, step-by-step rollout, making certain that customers are onboarded appropriately, and totally perceive how one can use Atlan earlier than rolling out new use instances.
Starting by enabling Seek for finish customers, Robert and his crew built-in Atlan with Contentful’s most essential functions, making certain their highest precedence information was seen and searchable, was enriched with descriptions, and was documented. Easing finish customers into utilizing Atlan, Robert and his crew started by responding to Slack requests about information with hyperlinks to information property inside Atlan.
“We used to reply these questions and publish a hyperlink, and now we’ve mentioned ‘Weren’t answering these questions anymore. Go to Atlan, that’s the place your supply of fact is, and that’s the place we would like you to begin self-serving’,” Robert defined.
With their vital information property accessible, enriched, and out there by way of self-service, Robert and his crew’s subsequent step was to allow Atlan Insights, a metadata-based question builder, in response to their earlier querying software, Redash, reaching end-of-life.
“Our hand was pressured 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 software to see that contextual info and to construct their queries and do ad-hoc evaluation as they wished to.” Robert shared.
A vital software for Contentful, Redash’s end-of-life meant that and not using a substitute, 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 crew to construct an integration that routinely migrated these queries to Atlan in mere weeks, saving extraordinary handbook effort.
“We needed to migrate all our queries over from Redash, and we didn’t wish to have to try this manually, however we had been going to must,” Robert defined. “We talked about this to the customer support crew and inside a few weeks, we had been advised ‘We’re constructing a connector. In the event you give us seven days, we’ll have one thing sorted for you so that you don’t must do all that handbook effort.’ It’s saved us a lot time.”
Yielding much more time financial savings for Contentful’s information crew is automated lineage, considerably easing affect evaluation as information engineers think about the downstream results of modifications 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 modifications quite a bit higher,” Robert shared.
Lastly, Robert and his crew are transferring to boost their catalog to drive a typical language at Contentful, appointing subject material consultants to complement glossaries, then personal and keep 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 information crew has enhanced their capacity to reply questions on their information, migrated to a brand new querying software, and is lowering breakages, permitting them to concentrate on extra essential work. However for information shoppers, Atlan represents a leap ahead in productiveness, providing self-service for information discovery that after value every of them six hours per week.
Earlier than, we’d be spending plenty of time fielding these questions. We did a consumer survey, and it was taking possibly six hours of individuals’s time per week to seek out the proper info, to grasp the knowledge, after which to use that to what it was they had been constructing. With Atlan, we’ve managed to scale back that considerably simply by having the info out there and having it documented. So we’ve obtained worth for our finish customers, as a result of they’ve the knowledge of their fingers. However for us, it’s permitting us to concentrate on what’s actually essential to Contentful.”
Robert Clifford-Jones, Head of Knowledge Intelligence and Governance
The strongest illustration of what the info crew’s laborious work has yielded for Contentful arrived in acquainted kind. A 3 a.m. telephone name to Robert informing him that vital fashions driving monetary reporting had failed.
“Our fashions had been operating, they run batch processing by means of the night time and all the pieces failed. It was the tip of the month, so we couldn’t do all our closing stories and test all of our monetary reporting on Monday, as was anticipated,” Robert shared. “I obtained a telephone name at three o’clock within the morning going ‘What’s happening? 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 crew had been in a position to resolve the problem inside hours, permitting the essential monetary stories 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 might resolve the problem earlier than reporting kicked off on Monday, whereas earlier than, they’d have needed to anticipate that repair.”
Robert Clifford-Jones, Head of Knowledge Intelligence and Governance
The following frontier for Robert and the Contentful crew focuses on information governance. The crew is tough at work tagging personally identifiable info in Atlan with a purpose to apply new masking and entry administration insurance policies to additional improve the safety of delicate monetary information. And with upcoming enhancements like Atlan AI, Robert and his crew are optimistic that Atlan will help them concentrate on what issues.
“The way in which I’m interested by that is how do I unencumber my crew to do the issues which are essential to them and the issues they’re keen about. Numerous the time is spent doing the issues which are barely mundane that may very well be performed higher by AI,” Robert defined. “That’s one thing we positively wish to do with Atlan going ahead. Given the brand new product releases developing, we might use Atlan extra in that area to do the documentation that takes up plenty of our time, and free our individuals as much as do the thrilling stuff.”
Having pushed Contentful’s information crew to new ranges of productiveness, and unlocking a brand new stage of understanding and entry for information shoppers, Robert stays assured that Atlan will probably be with he and his crew each step of the way in which as they proceed to develop.
I’ve adopted many a know-how and I’ve had good help previously. I’ve by no means had nearly as good help from a company as I’ve had from Atlan. I ask a query, and it’s answered virtually instantly. I don’t count on that, however that’s what occurs. If we increase a ticket or we spot one thing that’s fallacious, the crew are on it just about inside the hour. The help has been second-to-none.”
Robert Clifford-Jones, Head of Knowledge Intelligence and Governance
Photograph by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash
