Data Maturity Workshop: Unlock the potential of your data - Learn more
Ignition | 9 October 2024
In today’s fast-paced business landscape, data-driven decision-making is more critical than ever. Organisations are continually seeking ways to leverage data for better insights, improved efficiencies, and stronger competitive advantage. One of the more popular approaches for organising and managing data is Data Vault, a methodology designed to handle the complexity of enterprise data in a flexible and scalable way. However, while Data Vault offers significant long-term benefits, many organisations struggle with the initial time to value.
In a conversation between Sam Williams, Community Manager of the Data Innovator Exchange, and Julien Redmond, CEO of Ignition and IRiS, the topic of reducing time to value in Data Vault implementations and ensuring stakeholder engagement came into sharp focus. Julien offered valuable insights into how organisations can avoid common pitfalls and drive faster outcomes.
Watch the video or keep reading to learn more.
The conversation began with Sam Williams highlighting a major challenge in the data warehousing space: the time it takes to show value to the business. Despite Data Vault being an agile methodology that emphasises flexibility, organisations often encounter delays in delivering tangible results to their stakeholders.
Sam pointed out that many organisations, despite their best intentions, find themselves mired in the initial setup phase of Data Vault projects for longer than expected. This phase, often referred to as "phase zero," can involve building the technology platform, creating automation frameworks and establishing your processes and standards. While these steps are essential for long-term success, they frequently lead to frustration among stakeholders, who are left waiting for actionable insights.
Julien agreed, noting that the gap between starting a Data Vault project and delivering business value can erode trust and engagement. He described a common scenario where organisations attempt to ingest large amounts of data before delivering any results, which can backfire.
One of the key issues Julien discussed is the misalignment between business needs and the data engineering approach. He shared an example of a client that prioritised ingesting as much data as possible into the Data Vault before producing any business outcomes, despite advice to the contrary. While the intention was to create a comprehensive data platform, this strategy led to frustration among business stakeholders, who saw significant investment but little immediate return in the form of new reports or analytics.
This approach, Julien explained, is based on an outdated mentality of trying to solve the entire data problem upfront. “Stakeholders want a use case delivered. They want an answer to a particular business problem,” Julien said. In the client’s case, the business needed specific insights, but the decision to focus on large-scale ingestion caused delays in delivering those answers. The stakeholders, in turn, became disillusioned with the process, questioning the value of the platform.
Julien stressed the importance of aligning Data Vault projects with specific business use cases to demonstrate value quickly. Rather than attempting to solve the organisation’s entire data engineering challenge at once, the focus should be on solving smaller, well-defined business problems.
Data Vault, by design, allows for this kind of incremental approach. It supports the integration of data from multiple sources on a use case-by-use case basis. In Julien’s words, “Data Vault really helps because it allows you to do data integration at a use-case-sized unit of work.” This means that instead of waiting for a full data ingestion process to complete, teams can focus on the most critical data needed to answer pressing business questions.
This incremental delivery method is key to reducing time to value. By providing stakeholders with regular, small wins, you can maintain engagement, demonstrate the value of the Data Vault methodology, and build momentum for future initiatives.
Another critical point that emerged from the conversation was the need to engage stakeholders throughout the Data Vault implementation process. Julien noted that frustrations often arise when stakeholders feel out of the loop, especially when they see significant resources being allocated without a corresponding return on investment.
To counter this, Julien recommends a more agile approach, with frequent check-ins and updates to stakeholders. By delivering smaller, use case-driven outcomes, you can keep the business engaged and invested in the process. This also allows for faster feedback loops, where any issues can be identified and addressed early on, before they become major roadblocks.
Engaging stakeholders early also helps set realistic expectations. Redmond explained that one of the key lessons from his experience is that transparency is essential. When stakeholders understand the rationale behind focusing on specific use cases rather than a complete ingestion process, they are more likely to support the project.
In addition to recommending an incremental, use case-driven approach, Julien introduced IRiS, a solution developed by Ignition that helps organisations streamline their Data Vault projects. IRiS is designed to address many of the time-to-value challenges by automating much of the Data Vault development process, which often delays the delivery of insights to the business.
With IRiS, data engineers can automate key tasks in the data vault development processes. This not only accelerates the time it takes to start producing business outcomes but also ensures that best practices are followed from the outset. The tool’s established standards, templates and processes are based on years of experience, which reduces the risk of errors and improves the reliability of the entire Data Vault implementation.
“IRiS gets you to the starting line faster,” Julien emphasised. By reducing the manual steps, IRiS allows data engineers to focus on delivering value to the business sooner. This, in turn, helps maintain stakeholder engagement and keeps the project on track.
In summary, implementing Data Vault doesn’t have to be a long, drawn-out process that frustrates stakeholders. By shifting the focus to use case-driven data integration, organisations can deliver business value more quickly and engage stakeholders throughout the journey.
Tools like IRiS play a crucial role in accelerating this process, offering automation and best-practice frameworks that reduce the time and effort required to get started. As Julien and Sam discussed, by adopting a more agile, incremental approach to Data Vault implementation, businesses can see faster results, improve stakeholder engagement, and ultimately realise the full potential of their data investments.
For organisations looking to reduce the time to value in their Data Vault projects, it’s clear that focusing on use cases and leveraging automation tools like IRiS is the way forward.
