Content material Administration Expertise Chief Lowering 6-hour-per-week Knowledge Discovery Effort with Atlan

Valued at $3 billion, Contentful is a Collection F expertise 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+ prospects.

As Contentful continues to develop at unbelievable tempo throughout continents, industries, and use instances, information has performed a vital function in enabling sensible decision-making. And standing behind that information to make sure it’s reliable, obtainable, and activated is Robert Clifford-Jones, a 12-year veteran of the Knowledge & Analytics house, and Contentful’s Head of Knowledge Intelligence and Governance.

“Contentful is a scaling firm, and we’re taking market share and need to proceed to do this. The subsequent 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 could be 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 expertise 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 might be pushed to Redash and Looker for end-user entry. And to make sure Contentful’s information shoppers have the appropriate information to make knowledgeable choices, Robert and his crew started looking for an Lively Metadata Administration answer.

“Once I first began at Contentful, I might see the information crew was a very beneficial useful resource for Contentful. We had a really busy Slack channel, and a whole lot of the questions we had been spending a whole lot of time on had been ‘What information do we have now?’ or ‘Can we use this information for this objective?’,” Robert shared. “That led me to suppose that individuals clearly want some contextual info, and they should know what’s obtainable.”

Past the necessity for information context and discoverability, Robert’s crew sought an answer that would advance their information governance processes comparable to entry insurance policies, and enhance belief in information as Contentful was scaling. Launching an RFP course of, Contentful completely evaluated Atlan and Alation, ultimately selecting Atlan.

“What actually stood out to me is as we had been stepping via the method, we had a whole lot 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. Once 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, guaranteeing that customers are onboarded appropriately, and absolutely perceive learn how to 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, guaranteeing 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 stated ‘Weren’t answering these questions anymore. Go to Atlan, that’s the place your supply of fact is, and that’s the place we wish you to start out self-serving’,” Robert defined.

With their vital information property accessible, enriched, and obtainable through 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 device, 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 folks into the device to see that contextual info and to construct their queries and do ad-hoc evaluation as they needed to.” Robert shared.

A vital device for Contentful, Redash’s end-of-life meant that and not using a substitute, queries and ad-hoc evaluation could be difficult-to-impossible for a big swath of knowledge 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 guide effort.

“We needed to migrate all our queries over from Redash, and we didn’t need to have to do 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. When you give us seven days, we’ll have one thing sorted for you so that you don’t must do all that guide effort.’ It’s saved us a lot time.”

Yielding much more time financial savings for Contentful’s information crew is automated lineage, considerably easing influence evaluation as information 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 way of Atlan, we’re in a position to talk these adjustments quite a bit higher,” Robert shared.

Lastly, Robert and his crew are transferring to reinforce their catalog to drive a typical language at Contentful, appointing subject material specialists 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 widespread language inside Contentful. It is going to be saved in Atlan and we’ll drive folks 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 device, and is decreasing breakages, permitting them to deal with extra essential work. However for information shoppers, Atlan represents a leap ahead in productiveness, providing self-service for information discovery that when value every of them six hours per week.

Earlier than, we’d be spending a whole lot of time fielding these questions. We did a person survey, and it was taking possibly six hours of individuals’s time per week to search out the appropriate info, to know 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 information obtainable and having it documented. So we’ve acquired worth for our finish customers, as a result of they’ve the knowledge of their arms. However for us, it’s permitting us to deal with what’s actually essential to Contentful.”

Robert Clifford-Jones, Head of Knowledge Intelligence and Governance

The strongest illustration of what the information crew’s onerous work has yielded for Contentful arrived in acquainted kind. A 3 a.m. cellphone name to Robert informing him that vital fashions driving monetary reporting had failed.

“Our fashions had been operating, they run batch processing via the evening and every little thing failed. It was the tip of the month, so we couldn’t do all our closing studies and test all of our monetary reporting on Monday, as was anticipated,” Robert shared. “I acquired a cellphone 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 difficulty. However with automated lineage, Robert and his crew had been in a position to resolve the difficulty inside hours, permitting the essential monetary studies 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 difficulty earlier than reporting kicked off on Monday, whereas earlier than, they might have needed to look ahead to that repair.”

Robert Clifford-Jones, Head of Knowledge Intelligence and Governance

The subsequent frontier for Robert and the Contentful crew focuses on information governance. The crew 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 information. And with upcoming enhancements like Atlan AI, Robert and his crew are optimistic that Atlan may help them deal with what issues.

“The way in which I’m occupied with that is how do I liberate my crew to do the issues which might be essential to them and the issues they’re enthusiastic about. Numerous the time is spent doing the issues which might be barely mundane that may very well be executed higher by AI,” Robert defined. “That’s one thing we undoubtedly need to do with Atlan going ahead. Given the brand new product releases developing, we might use Atlan extra in that house to do the documentation that takes up a whole lot of our time, and free our folks 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 can be with he and his crew each step of the best way as they proceed to develop.

I’ve adopted many a expertise and I’ve had good help previously. I’ve by no means had pretty much as good help from a company as I’ve had from Atlan. I ask a query, and it’s answered nearly instantly. I don’t count on that, however that’s what occurs. If we elevate a ticket or we spot one thing that’s incorrect, 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

Picture by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash